


Longest Way Round

by Chastened



Category: Political RPF - US 21st c., US Presidential Campaign
Genre: 2020 US Presidential Election, House of Cards-ish, Lis Smith is a goddess, Love Story, M/M, secret behind-the-scenes political shenanigans, this fic traffics in irony & insanity so it & its tags should not be taken at face value alone lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2020-10-18 05:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 82,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20633912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chastened/pseuds/Chastened
Summary: Mayor Pete Buttigieg is headlining a historic long-shot campaign for president. But he's not the only one working hard to ensure that he wins the most important election in American history...no matter what it takes.





	1. Late November 2016

“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

He gave a slow, coy smile in response.

The two diners were tucked away in the corner booth of a dark Midwestern greasy spoon. One was a petite woman with a sleek black bob, faux fur coat and designer handbag tossed on the seat beside her. Between them on the sticky table was her phone; it was set to silent, but it buzzed with the erratic frequency of a cardiac patient’s heart monitor. Her companion was an elegant young man with a round face, a honeyed voice, and piercing blue eyes that matched the periwinkle shades woven into his prim gingham shirt.

After a long pause, he broke the incredulous silence. “I’m someone who knows what he wants, and I’m someone who knows how to get it.” He leaned forward, never breaking eye contact. “I followed your work in 2012.”

“Well, if you’re doing _ this _” - she gestured at the file folder splayed open between them - “then I’d hope so.”

“You won re-election for President Obama,” he said. “You defined the narrative of the whole cycle.”

“If you think flattery means anything to me, you’re a fucking moron.”

She started gathering her things to leave, but he touched her forearm. The gentleness of the gesture stopped her cold in her tracks.

“You know how to win the game,” he said. “The others don’t even know they’re playing.”

She sat down, phone clattering back onto the table. “Look,” she said. “I only have so much time here tonight, so let’s cut to the goddamned chase. I don’t give a fuck about happened in 2012. I also don’t give a fuck about what you think, or what anyone thinks, because I know that I’m good at what I do, and, unlike the other bitches in this business, I don't need anyone to tell me I am. So what _ do _ I give a fuck about? I give a fuck about getting the best candidate on the fucking debate stage to pummel the rhetorical and quite possibly literal shit out of that marmalade bastard. I give a fuck about exiling him and his cheating fascist pond scum of a political party to a modern-day fucking St. Helena. And I give a fuck about actually doing something in concert with competent professionals that might - and stop the goddamned presses! - actually improve Americans’ lives. Because do you know what pisses me off the most? Incompetence. Fucking _ incompetence_. If you can't get me that, then we are done, tonight and forever."

She downed the last of her Bud Lite in a single swig - whether in triumph or despair, it was impossible to tell.

Her companion watched her.

She watched him watch her.

Neither of them budged, even as her phone buzzed itself to the edge of the table.

“Work for me,” he finally said. “Work for us. We can do it together. We can do competence. Heck, let’s be ambitious and aim for excellence.”

She cackled. “You are _ insane_. The gay mayor with the butt name is not going to become the next President of the United States. I don’t even know why we’re talking right now.”

“Because you like a challenge?”

“Throwing yourself in front of a train is not a challenge.”

He closed the folder and pushed it across the table. “Read the white papers I wrote,” he said. “Watch some interviews. That’s all I’m asking. It’s an unconventional approach, but there’s something there. I promise.”

She eyed the folder dubiously, but finally, impulsively, snatched it up and rammed it into her bag. A beatific grin lit up his face. It was the most boyish he’d looked all night.

“I can’t guarantee anything,” she warned.

“I know.”

“There’s going to be at least ten candidates. Twenty, if shit gets crazy.”

“I know.”

“The opposition is going to eat a guy named Pete Bootyboy alive. If there’s a sex scandal, it’ll come out, and if there’s not a sex scandal, they’ll make one up.”

“I know.”

“You’re a cocky son-of-a-bitch,” she said.

“I know.”

She snapped the bag shut and narrowed her eyes, assessing him. “Does your boyfriend know we’re having this conversation?”

“Well,” he said carefully. “I have to choose the right moment. But I’m capable of that.”

“You’d fucking better be. If he’s not onboard, none of this works.” She peered at her phone, then started hammering out a text as she talked. “Give me twelve hours to go over this folder. My people will call you. Not vice versa. Let me get you into my contacts. How do you spell his last name?”

“B-u-t-t-i-g-i-e-g.”

“Christ,” she muttered. “And what was your name again?”

He smiled. “My name is Chasten. It’s been a pleasure, Lis.”


	2. September 12, 2019: Houston, Texas

As the Buttigieg campaign staff checked into their hotel before the debate, a woman stood awkwardly to the side, carrying a small suitcase that looked like the nuclear football.

Lis burst through the hotel’s revolving door, words tumbling from her perfectly outlined scarlet lips. “Say, I’m hearing we’re on the fourth floor!” she yelled toward the front desk, unable to wait the few seconds it would take to cross the lobby before initiating conversation. “We specifically requested a floor as high as possible, and I know it’s not you personally trying to fuck us over, but I think maybe your bosses are.” She barked into her phone. “Yes, I know Taylor Swift is on the other line. But we have to time the endorsement right, and the timing is all wrong.” She pressed a hand up to her phone apologetically and leaned, conspiratorially, over the front desk counter. “Sorry, I’m distracted here. Fucking presidential campaigns, you know? So, what do you have?”

The clerk stiffened, turned to his keyboard, and wordlessly tapped at it. “We just had a bank of rooms open on the top floor, ma’am.”

Chasten suddenly appeared beside her, his grin gregarious. “And if we could get a cheese wheel in Chasten and Pete Buttigieg’s room, please.”

“We don’t need a cheese wheel,” Pete shouted absentmindedly from in front of the lobby TV, tuned to CNN’s pre-debate coverage.

“He’ll take a cheese wheel,” Chasten said.

The clerk blinked several times in a row and quickly handed over the keycards. “Sure thing. Enjoy your stay.”

* * *

The staff gathered quickly and efficiently at the elevator bank. Keycards were distributed. There was an established protocol to the ascent; everyone piled into the elevators, chattering and comparing clipboards, deliberately leaving the last car for Lis, Chasten, and Pete to occupy alone.

“Someday someone’s going to figure out that Taylor Swift is never actually on the other line,” Pete said as soon as the doors had closed behind them.

“I’m working on it,” Chasten said, eyes fixed on the floor numbers as they sailed effortlessly upward. “I’ve tagged her on Twitter. You make sense for her brand this album cycle.”

“Yeah, I’d leave the celebrity endorsements to us, egghead,” Lis said, dialing. “By the way, I’ve put off Cillizza one too many times, so unfortunately I’m calling him back. Somebody please kick me if I say fuck. Chasten, can you settle wardrobe? Make sure there’s no dead gnat on him this time, Jesus Christ. Use bug spray if you have to. I’ll be by in five minutes, hopefully less. Looks like you’re room 1309. Hello, Chris! Fucking fabulous to finally connect with you.” Chasten kicked her high heel. “Shit.”

The elevator dinged, the doors opened, and they fanned out. Chasten tossed Lis a keycard; she caught it one-handed and whipped him the bird.

Pete shook his head. Chasten shrugged and offered his arm. Pete smiled and nodded and took it. They walked side-by-side down the hallway.

It was the first time they'd been alone together for a week. The sudden silence at these intermittent reunions was always uncomfortable, heavy with unspoken and unanswered questions. But finally, as they went around the corner, Pete couldn't take the suspense anymore. He glanced around and leaned in to steal a graceless kiss; it landed somewhere above Chasten’s ear. Chasten raised his eyebrow in skepticism - but flushed red anyway.

“I’m sorry; that was dumb,” Pete mumbled, then he looked ahead to see that Chasten was smiling at the staffer pacing outside their door. The little suitcase was deposited carefully on the floor. “What’s this?”

“It’s from my luggage,” Chasten said. “Thanks, Saralena, I really appreciate it.” Saralena nodded and smiled and disappeared down the hallway before a bewildered Pete could echo his husband’s gratitude.

Chasten had to swipe the keycard a few times in a row; the little light blipped red as Pete stood with the suitcase awkwardly at his feet. “Why do I suddenly feel like JFK during the missile crisis?” he asked.

“Because you feeling like JFK is the entire rationale behind this campaign,” Chasten said. He dipped the keycard one final, steady, strategic time. The light flashed green. “Minus the enthusiasm for adultery,” he said with a pointed glance, and then he pushed open the door with his shoulder and strode into the room.

Pete didn’t want to stand alone in a hotel hallway next to a tiny suitcase, so he picked it up and set it at the foot of the bed. Chasten was busy doing the first thing he did whenever he entered any hotel room: pushing the heavy curtains open as far as they could go, letting the warm rays of golden sun spread into every gray corner. Pete had married a man incapable of living in a dark space.

“Seriously, what is this?” Pete asked, poking the suitcase as Chasten attended to his curtain ritual. “Did Lis get the nuclear codes?”

“Not yet.” Finally content with the quality of light, Chasten turned his attention back to his husband. “It’s a tie suitcase,” he said with a grin. “We can keep our ties in it.”

Pete stared. “You bought a tie suitcase.”

“I have a specific vision for tonight,” Chasten said, clicking and popping the latches open. Within were tucked neat rows of rolled ties, all arranged along a color gradient. “Obviously you have dibs on blue. But I think the exact shade should depend on mine.”

“You bought a tie suitcase,” Pete repeated.

Chasten’s right index finger ran along the fabric; he set his left lightly on his husband’s lips. “I love you, but shush. So we’re - or, er, you’re hitting the unity theme tonight, right? While simultaneously differentiating yourself? Thank God I’m not the one squaring that circle; I’d crack for sure. But you can pull it off. By the way, the comms team had a memo on that point specifically that I think you'd find helpful; I tucked it into your briefcase at the airport. You’re going to try mentioning your coming out in the closing statement, right? If you pull that off, and you usually do, there’s probably going to be pictures and videos of us in the news stories. I’ll hop onstage as soon as I can after, depending on where the cameras are relative to your podium. ABC at least might get some decent B-roll out of it, as long as Biden doesn’t block the view again. Anyway, I’m thinking I should go with red. You’re blue; I’m red. We’re both wearing white shirts. Flag colors. Patriotism. Your military service. Blue state, red state. Democrat, Republican. Unity. That in turn echoes Obama's 2004 convention speech, which in turn echoes the theme of fresh-faced leadership from the Midwest. Voila. It’s subconscious, but I’m increasingly convinced that ninety percent of this entire process is subconscious.”

Throughout his monologue, Chasten had been selecting and withdrawing ties in various shades of blue and red, then, when each failed to pass critical muster, lying them flat on the bed, carefully rolling them back up, and returning them to their correct position in the gradient. Pete sank onto the bed, his posture suggesting a strange, discouraged awe. First he sat; at the mention of Obama, he laid down, eyes closed, reduced to being a motionless tie mannequin.

A long moment of silence passed. “What do you think?” Chasten finally asked, realizing he had just said quite a lot.

“Honestly?” Pete said. “I’m remembering how I became mayor without a tie consultant.”

Chasten froze mid-roll. “But look,” he said, “at what’s all happened since you met me.”

Pete’s eyes fluttered open. In them was a dark stare typically reserved for presidential candidates making cheap shots at debates.

“I’m sorry,” Chasten said quickly. “That came out wrong.”

Pete, content he had made his point, closed his eyes again. “I know. It’s just…” He sighed. “I didn’t go to Harvard and Oxford to learn tie theory.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Chasten said, modulating his tone of voice to the soothing one he used for despairing seventh graders. “That’s why Lis and I are here. You use your brain for the politics that matter - ”

“ - So you can use yours for the politics that don’t.”

“Good. It’s finally sinking in.”

Pete said nothing in reply.

Chasten selected a tie from the navy side of the gradient. He started choosing his words more carefully. “If your eyes were open, this one would play off them in a very pretty way,” he offered, and he meant it.

Pete just laid there.

Finally Chasten sighed and sat down on the bed. “Look,” he said. “It’s not your fault that the media has turned presidential politics into a celebrity-obsessed TV-friendly shitshow. Why should you get sucked into it if you don’t need to be? If you’re too smart? If you don’t have the instinct for it? If the game’s not fun for you?” He set down the tie and laced his fingers between his husband’s. When that didn’t rouse him, he leaned down until their noses nearly touched. “I promise you, in ten years, our way of doing this will be the norm,” he whispered. “We are ahead of the curve. People don’t win the presidency, Peter. Partnerships do.”

“I’m not saying they don’t,” Pete whispered back, eyes finally opening again. “All I’m saying is, if this thing is going to be won based on tie color, then we’re screwed. And not just you and me and this campaign; I mean, the collective we. The entire American project is screwed.”

“Oh, you know how I love it when you say 'the entire American project,'” Chasten whispered.

This made Pete crack. Despite himself, he started laughing. Chasten joined in, and used the opportunity to test the tie against eye color. Pete saw what he was doing but didn’t resist.

Satisfied, Chasten stood up and held a hand out to Pete, who reluctantly accepted it. “There’s no rule that says you can’t excel at everything,” Chasten said. “You know that.” He leaned in. He became all that Pete could see. His voice lowered. “Seriously, you out of everyone know that.”

Pete bit his lip.

Chasten broke the kiss, snatching up the blue tie and withdrawing a red one from the suitcase. “God forbid, if things go south, you start wearing purple,” he suddenly announced. “It’ll help you get Warren's VP nod. She wears purple all the time. She has a thing for it.” When Pete didn’t answer, Chasten glanced up in exasperation. “How did you not notice that? You’re the one onstage with her!”

“I love you,” Pete said, “but sometimes you make it difficult to remember why.”

“Oh, you’ll remember why just fine once I hold up the Lincoln Bible for you.”

Pete blinked, as if he hadn’t gotten around to envisioning that particular aspect of the scenario quite yet and the force of it was knocking him off-balance. Chasten smiled to himself.

Suddenly their door burst open. “I’m not interrupting any kinky newlywed shit, am I? I intercepted the cheese wheel in the hallway. Fuck CNN, by the way. Where are we with wardrobe? Ties?”

“He’s blue; I’m red,” Chasten said, picking up a crumble of asiago. “Thanks, Lis.”

“Oooh, I like it. Bipartisan.” She collapsed into the office chair, idly testing its swivel capabilities, then, catching sight of the open suitcase, she let out a high-pitched cackle. “Oh, my God, you actually bought the tie suitcase? I thought you were joking. That is some serious fucking ambition, congratulations.”

“I refuse to take responsibility for the tie suitcase,” Pete said as Chasten started looping blue fabric around his neck.

Lis’s demeanor suddenly became serious. “Hold the line on that; otherwise, it’s Edwards and the $400 haircut all over again. Chasten, you’re not allowed to pretend you’re old enough to understand that reference.” Chasten shrugged, although he was clearly ready to lecture on lessons learned from Edwards and the $400 haircut. “Are you doing a selfie for Insta tonight, or do you want me to play photographer?”

“Selfies aren’t dignified enough for a debate,” Chasten said, turning his attention to his own tie. “Selfies are for restaurants and baseball games. Tonight is not a game.”

Lis considered, swiveling thoughtfully back and forth. “I don’t know; I think it might be striking. There’s only so many sweet non-selfie poses you two can contort yourselves into before the general public develops adult-onset diabetes.”

“Try us,” Chasten said.

“Now is when I make some kind of inappropriate joke about Medicare for All Who Want It bringing down the cost of insulin,” Lis said, springing to her feet. “Here, take this chair.”

“I would like to remind the room that I have a binder of debate prep to review,” Pete said as Chasten pushed him down.

“The room knows you had that binder memorized two weeks ago,” Lis said. “If you review anything, review the memo on differentiation strategy. It's in your briefcase. Chasten, stand on that side. Make him the center. Put your left hand on the desk and your right on Pete. Pretend you’re the benevolent mild-mannered mastermind behind this entire historic operation, as unlikely and unprecedented as such an arrangement would be. Pete, look over your shoulder at him. Look less exasperated. Remember how suave that fucker is. Excellent. You’re backlit, but we can see the sky reflected in the TV screen. The sensation of height is there, and that’s mainly what we wanted, I think.”

Something suddenly clicked for Pete. “Wait. That’s why you wanted the room up here? As background for an Instagram photo?”

“Well, obviously, Peter,” Chasten said just before Lis took the shot. “Say. Look up at me. In a presidential campaign, everything signifies something. And height,” he said, smiling down, “signifies power.”


	3. September 16, 2019: Clio, Michigan

“Peter hired one of the very best communications advisors in this country, and I genuinely don’t want to have to sic her on you.”

It was late afternoon, and the early autumn light was fading both outside and inside the church. Pastor Rhyan had been absorbed in rearranging the praise band’s drum sets and keyboards, but as soon as he heard that still-familiar voice, he spun around, shocked. “Chas?” he asked, addressing the silhouette approaching him.

“It’s Chasten, thanks.”

Rhyan grinned, strode down the aisle, and threw an arm around his brother. Chasten didn’t return the gesture. “I - um,” said Rhyan, finally stepping back. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I didn’t think you’d talk with me if you were.”

Rhyan wiped his hands, suddenly sweaty, on the thighs of his jeans. “Do you want to sit down, or - ?”

Chasten surveyed the chairs scattered around them. “I don’t know,” he said, and it was the truth.

“Do you want anything to drink? We’d have to go to the church kitchen, but we can do that.”

“I thought you guys kept the wine in here.” Then, immediately: “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate." A moment of confusion. "Do you even take Communion?”

The question hung awkwardly in the air. Rhyan cleared his throat. “So. What brings you here?”

“Well. I was in Traverse City this morning. Visiting the high school. Talking to the kids. And I’ve been wanting to come here to see you. So I rented a car and I had the campaign rebook me on a late-night flight out of Detroit. I’m not going to sleep tonight.”

“Mmm.” Rhyan’s nod possessed great gravity, as if he understood what such a drastic change of plans meant for a tightly run presidential campaign. “How’s the trail treating you and Pete?”

“Why the hell do you care?”

Rhyan’s eyes widened. “Please. We’re in church, Chas.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled, glancing down at his feet.

“But to answer your question, I care because you’re my little brother and I love you.”

The words triggered an unnaturally high pitched, manic laugh from Chasten. “No. No, that’s not how love works, Rhyan. If you loved me, you wouldn’t be going on cable news to tell millions of people that my husband kills babies.”

Discomfort mounting, Rhyan broke eye contact and began to stare into the middle distance. “So you were watching,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, I was watching. At the end of every hard day of campaigning, Peter and I enjoy kicking back, turning on the big screen TV, and unwinding with a nice relaxing hour of _Tucker Carlson_.”

Rhyan’s expression turned puzzled and just a bit hopeful.

“Of _course_ we weren’t watching,” Chasten snapped. He collapsed on a chair in exasperation, his back to his brother. “Lis - she’s the PR woman I mentioned - she sent me the clip after it was posted on Youtube.”

“Did Pete see it?”

“Peter,” Chasten enunciated. “His name is _Peter_. It was summarized in a media brief. I tend not to waste his time with things that don’t matter.”

“Well, I was hoping he’d see it.”

Chasten twisted around in the chair, his expression one of honest disbelief. “What difference would it make if he saw it? His father studied to be a goddamn - sorry - Jesuit priest. He went to Catholic high school. He forced me to get married in a _church_, Rhyan. Why do you think he’d listen to a small-town pastor from Michigan?”

Rhyan shrugged. “I guess because he married a small-town teacher from Michigan.”

Chasten sighed and hung his head. A moment of awkward silence passed. When he began to speak again, he did so very slowly and carefully. “Peter has an annoying habit of extending presumptions of good faith to people who he disagrees with. And, although it goes against every single instinct I have in this moment, I'm going to try to follow his example.” He took a deep breath. “I genuinely think you think you’re doing something good. But I promise: what you are doing is not good. It is bad. It is very, very bad. There are sick, angry, terrible people in this world who would be happy to hurt my husband just because he’s gay. I know that because I read my mail. Those people can’t be encouraged to hate him even more. Do you know how many viewers Tucker Carlson has?”

Rhyan’s voice was quiet. “You’re the one who would know that.”

“He averaged 3.1 million a night last month.”

Chasten paused, waiting to see if this information meant anything. But all Rhyan did in reply was shift his weight between his feet.

Finally Chasten cracked. His voice broke. “I don’t know how to make you understand, Rhy! _I love him._ I love him; he is the project of my life. If something ever happens to Peter, I will spend every day I have left haunting whoever hurt him. Please don’t put him in any more danger than he already is. I’m begging you. I drove for three hours today to beg you.”

Rhyan considered his brother’s words. But his expression was dark. “I can’t change what the Bible says,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to! I’m just asking you to lay low.”

An incredulous smile started curling the corner of Rhyan’s lip. “Like you’re laying low?”

“Excuse me?”

“You may think I’m some kind of country hick, Chas, but I watch the news. I read that Washington Post profile on you. I couldn’t believe it.”

Chasten stared.

“You _lied_,” Rhyan said.

“I...curated.”

“You curated a heck of a lot there, Chas!”

“I have always loved Harry Potter and Celine Dion. Those were not lies.”

“Well, maybe not, but... When you talk to these hoity-toity big city journalist types, you act like you never cared about politics until you met Pete. That's bull. You know it; I know it. You went as Bush for Halloween in fifth grade.”

“Don’t remind me,” Chasten muttered.

“Mom still has the pictures.”

“She _had_ them,” Chasten corrected.

“Well, whatever. But I remember. I remember you taping the 2000 conventions. The 2004 conventions. All ten million hours of them. Taking notes on politicians’ stage presence. Grading them. I remember being roped into playing debate with you. Making Mom be the moderator. Remember all those AP History textbooks you collected in middle school? All the letters you were always writing to senators? Asking me to ask you to recite all the vice presidents in chronological order? Heck, you got your degree in global studies, and you don’t even hide that! But all these profiles still make you out to be this doe-eyed political virgin. It’s ridiculous. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if you went to college in Wisconsin just because it would help you win Wisconsin in 2020.”

“That is insane! You have to be 35 to run for president! I wouldn't be constitutionally eligible!”

“You’re not helping your argument!” Rhyan took a few steps forward until he was yelling in his sitting brother’s face. “How deep does this whole thing go? I've wondered. Did you get theater training just so you’d be good on the stump? Rack up student loan debt so you’d bond with young voters? Become a teacher just because liberals love teachers? How many online profiles did you swipe past before you found someone standing behind a podium? What kind of sick thrill did you get when you Googled his name and found out he was a mayor? When he said he wanted to run for governor? Do you even love Pete? Or do you just love where he’s going to take you?”

Chasten stood up so quickly that the force of the motion pushed back the chair and it scratched the floor. “How dare you?” he cried. “I made a vow to God that I’d follow Peter to the ends of the earth. A vow you could have seen, by the way, if you would have listened to Mom and gone to the wedding.”

Rhyan ignored the stab and continued on. “I could have gone on the record about so much. Told everyone what a calculating freak you’ve always been. Blown up your political narrative. Maybe your marriage; I don’t know. I don’t _want_ to know. But I didn’t. Lucky for you, I’m only speaking up about the stuff that actually matters. And also, while we’re chatting, let’s get another thing straight: I never, ever kicked you out of the house.”

“Why does it always come back to this?” They were both screaming now, their voices resonating through the big empty room. 

“Because you lied about your family to the Washington Post! You broke Mom’s heart!”

“I told the truth about my family to the Washington Post! When I came out, you said, ‘no brother of mine’!”

“If I ever said that, I never meant it, and you know it. I will always love you, Chasten. What I can’t understand is why you can’t love us.”

Suddenly Chasten grabbed Rhyan’s collar with a vehemence he didn’t know he had. He pulled his brother’s face up into his. It felt like he was hissing curses into a distorted mirror. “If you hurt Peter,” he said, voice low, breath shaky, “I will do more than not love you. I will hate you, and I will hurt you.”

He let go of Rhyan, who stumbled a few steps backward, partially from the force of the push, partially from the shock of the fierce physicality of his gentle baby brother. Chasten stalked out of the room without apologizing. “Good-bye!” he screamed, his instinctive politeness spoiling his dramatic exit, before he slammed the door behind him.

* * *

Lis Smith was in bed, drinking wine and eating chocolates out of a tiny crystal bowl. She was wrapped in a fluffy white bathrobe. Beside her slept a handsome man whose name she had already forgotten.

She patted inside the lacy bra hanging from the headboard, withdrew a key from it, and unlocked a padlock hanging from the nightstand drawer. It took a few tries for the key to take, but finally she yanked the drawer open and dug through the contents until she emerged with her phone, a tangled wad of earbuds, and a tiny Moleskine journal. 

After a brief Google search, she arrived at the archive of Pastor Rhyan’s sermons.

“Oppo research - R.G.,” she wrote carefully in the journal, and she clicked play.


	4. June 16, 2015: South Bend, Indiana

Years ago he had crafted a line for inclusion in a very hypothetical speech:

“It was a given in my mind that you could either be out or you could be in office. Not both.”

He had become a prodigy of compartmentalization: indeed, an expert in compartmentalizing the very fact that he was compartmentalizing.

But the instant that he submitted his final, worked-to-death draft of “Why Coming Out Matters” to the South Bend paper, he realized that his compartments weren’t watertight after all. He was now officially out - and still a politician.

And he had no idea what to do next.

This wasn’t just a fork in the road of his professional life, or his personal life. Freedom brought dozens of forks, dozens of roads, dozens of lives. Granted, he knew exactly where he wanted to go, but along the way he’d found himself lost in an endless maze of roundabouts.

He was disgusted that the first and best metaphor that his brain could concoct was “I’d found myself lost in an endless maze of roundabouts.”

Traffic rules and an exhortation to obey them came to mind unbidden. “If you’re at a roundabout and there is someone coming from your left, yield for them," a cheery voice might say. "Stay alert and keep each other safe.”

He reminded himself that nobody else thought like this, and that he was hopelessly alone.

* * *

The editorial dropped on his city’s porches and sidewalks the morning of June 16. It was a day of forced smiles, redirected questions, and a roiling, acidic gnaw. _Actually, we are here for the pancake breakfast._ _Actually, we are here to discuss the work of the soup kitchen. Actually, no one is blackmailing me; it's just that the time was right._ As per usual, he got home as the summer sun was setting. He had never been so happy to lock his door behind him.

In the absence of family, he had converted one of his white house’s many empty bedrooms into an office. Its only decoration was a vintage JFK poster hung behind his childhood desk. One brave day, he dared to nail up a mirror to the opposite wall, so that every morning before he left for work, he could see the former president’s face hovering over his shoulder. Tonight, though, Kennedy’s presence felt more like a taunt than inspiration.

He began the night by skipping dinner and drinking every beer in the house, each bottle locally brewed. He ran out of beer, but made a smooth transition to cigars. Much to his disgust, he retained the presence of mind to recognize he wasn’t properly appreciating the smoke. He dutifully switched over to the cheap gas station cigarettes that he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk.

He was just finishing his fifth cigarette and watching a rerun of a speech on CSPAN when his phone started to ring. It was the call that he knew would be the day’s last. Everyone else in town had fallen asleep long ago.

“Hi, Mike,” he said.

Mike Schmuhl was an old high school friend turned campaign manager, and the person who had known longer than anyone - even Pete - the ultimate inevitability of this day. Two years ago, Mike had left the States to study in Paris. That move had led to a gentle, general drifting apart and a pattern of tired, late night conversations. But nevertheless, for reasons neither of them fully understood, they retained a mysterious and brotherly bond.

“Hey, Pete,” Mike said, his voice a soft-spoken apology. “I just wanted to send my congratulations. Sorry I’m late.”

“Thanks.” Pete patted around the empty beer bottles on the desk before realizing his lighter had fallen to the floor. “You’re never late."

“It wasn’t easy, but it was the right thing to do.”

Pete lit his sixth cigarette. “Was it?”

When Mike didn't answer right away, Pete looked down at the silent phone, taking a grim satisfaction in spreading his gloom.

“Don’t tell me you’re having doubts,” Mike finally said. “After all we’ve planned - ”

“Everything depends on November.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“From God’s lips to your ear.” His brow furrowed. “No. From your ears to...wait.”

“You don’t sound right. Something wrong?”

Pete watched a long sigh of smoke drift to the ceiling. “I’m scared,” he said.

“Of what?”

“I’m scared I was too brave.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“I’m feeling skittish. You know I don’t like feeling skittish.”

“Let’s break it down, then. What’s the worst-case scenario?”

Mike was parroting a frequently-used Pete line, and a parroted frequently-used Pete line was the last thing that Pete wanted to hear. “Worst case scenario?” he repeated. His tone was incredulous. “Worst case scenario is I lose my mayoral race because I can’t wait six months for dick. Sorry,” he said, immediately flushing red. “That was inappropriate. I’ve had a lot to drink tonight.”

“Well. That’s understandable.”

Pete started to swivel in his chair, slowly. As he spun he saw anew every dimly lit corner, each stacked with work detritus and absolutely nothing else, because there _was_ nothing else. “Then,” he said, as if magnetically drawn to the train of circumstance about to crush him, “I turn down running for Congress. A beaten gay mayor has no chance of winning the 2nd. If I'm voted out in November, folks laugh in my face when I seek the nomination for governor. I can't imagine anyone worthwhile in the Clinton administration would want me. Our shot for a presidential campaign in ‘24 or ‘28 disappears. I run out of savings. One day I start returning McKinsey’s calls. I buy myself a nice watch. In fifty years I die surrounded by books written in twenty different languages. Then…” His voice turned dark. “The housekeeper discovers my body.”

He leaned back in his chair, despondent but proud of himself for managing to string together a paragraph.

“Well,” Mike finally said. “That’s quite the worst case scenario.”

Pete nodded solemnly, taking a long drag from the cigarette, indulgently inhaling his own misery.

“But all that said,” Mike said, “at least write your own tragedy right. This was never about you needing to get laid. This is about you using the truth to your political advantage. You need to win as an openly gay man. Waiting any longer would make you look like a coward. And you, Pete Buttigieg, are no coward.”

Pete looked down at the back of his hand. There was warm salty water there that he had apparently wiped off his own face. “I am so drunk right now,” he said.

“If you lose in November - and I’m not saying you will - you can come back from it. There are other races.”

“Like what? Dogcatcher?”

“You just have to trust that someday a light bulb will turn on, and you’ll know exactly what you need to do.”

Pete sounded dubious. “I hope you’re right.”

After that, neither of them knew what to say. The only option now was waiting out the summer, and they both knew it.

Pete’s attention drifted from the silent voice on the phone to the loud candidate on the television.

“Did you watch Trump’s announcement today?” he asked Mike.

“Enough to get the gist.”

Pete found himself laughing for the first time that week. “Can you imagine the circus if that son-of-a-bitch actually won the nomination?”

Mike snorted. “At least it would be entertaining. Politics as reality show.”

“What if…” Pete, suddenly thoughtful, leaned forward for emphasis, as if Mike was in the room with him. “What if he won...period?”

“You are extremely drunk right now.”

“I’m drunk, but I’m right. If a party wins two consecutive presidential terms, that party usually doesn’t win a third.”

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency,” Mike said, “then I will move to South Bend to personally oversee your 2020 campaign.”

At the sheer idiocy of this idea, Pete started giggling. Those giggles soon turned into hiccups, and then smoky coughs.

Mike, through his own laughter, defended himself as Pete hacked away. “Well! If Donald Trump could win the presidency, why couldn’t a brave and honest and beloved two-term mayor? Because in 2020 that’s what you’ll be. You just wait and see.”

After his cough finally quieted, Pete sat disheveled in the darkness, taking several long moments to catch his breath. “God, I don’t deserve you,” he said. “Please forgive my demeanor tonight. I’m just so tired. And so tipsy. And so gay.”

“Get your beauty rest, man. I think as of today you’re officially on the market.”

Pete smiled at that. But then something suddenly struck him, and the smile slowly faded. He leaned back in his chair. “Do you…” he started, then he stopped. It took him a moment to find the right words. He tapped the cigarette, carefully, on the edge of the ashtray. “Do you remember that list I asked you to make?”

“You’ve asked me to make a lot of lists.”

“The list of...women interested in…” He grasped for words. “An arrangement…”

“Oh,” Mike said quickly, interrupting. “Yes, I remember.”

“Burn it. No point to that now.”

“Of course.”

“God, that was a harebrained scheme.” Pete let out a long sigh of smoke. “You never actually reached out to any of them, did you? They must think I’m pathetic. Not that they’d be wrong.”

Mike cleared his throat. “I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I never made the list. Because I knew you’d eventually do what you did today. Because in the end, you always do what’s right.”

Pete nodded, absorbing what this meant. “Do you usually not do what I tell you to?” he asked.

“Excuse me?"

“Make another list."

“Pete."

“I said, make another list. But of single men.”

When Mike didn’t reply, he clarified.

“Who are gay.”

“That is definitely an idea to revisit sober.”

“No. Do it now. Write this down.”

“I don’t think - ”

“_Write this down_,” Pete repeated.

Mike sighed. “Okay. Writing this down.”

The two waited for a long time in silence. Pete had clearly never thought, in detail, about what he was finally going to verbalize. But by the time he spoke, the words spun out fully-formed in paragraphs, like a perfectly calibrated 90-second debate answer, delivered with barely a trace of a slur.

“Someone kind. Someone funny. Someone turned on by my ambition. But also someone who has ambitions of his own. I don’t want a sycophant. Sycophants, Mike, should be anathema to the powerful.”

“No sycophants,” Mike said, dryly. “Got it.”

“Someone who likes stages and lights. Someone who always knows where the cameras are. But someone who knows how to serve people. And someone who reads to our children in such a quiet voice that my heart breaks when I watch them.”

“I think it’s time you go to bed.”

“Keep writing. This is the most important point. Someone who is more lovable than I am. Because I am fundamentally unlovable. By design. I am duty and policy in shirtsleeves. They'll call me a robot, so I need a human. Someone who needs me, but someone who I need, too. And someone who - assuming I didn’t fuck everything up this morning - has good taste in White House china. Preferably a pattern with periwinkle. To match his eyes...” Then, sharply, as if he was waking himself from a dream: “Are you writing this down, Mike?”

“I am writing this down,” Mike said, clearly not writing this down.

Pete took a deep breath. When he spoke, his voice cracked. “Find him, Mike. I know what I want, and I think I can get us there. But it's going to be a long way. I can’t get there alone.”

“How about you get some rest, Pete?” For the first time that night, Mike’s soothing voice was tinged with worry. “We’ll be in touch another day. And even though I don’t think you’re going to remember this in the morning, I’m saying it again: I’m proud of you.”

“Why are you so good to me?”

Mike ignored the question. “Clean out your guest room, Mayor Buttigieg. We’ll be launching your 2020 campaign from it.”

Pete smiled at the absurdity, the sheer glory of the fantasy. “I will. Good morning, Mike.”

“Good night.”

The call disconnected, and Pete was once again left alone, the only motion in the room coming from a wildly gesticulating Donald Trump. He picked up the remote and turned up the volume, morbid curiosity rising.

“Well, you need somebody, because politicians are all talk, no action. Nothing’s gonna get done. They will not bring us— believe me— to the promised land. They will not.”

Pete studied Trump, never taking his eyes off the screen, even as he slowly reached over to the ashtray to grind out the cigarette. He had watched the announcement for the first time right after he’d returned home - it had been grim entertainment for a grim day - but now, watching it a second time, he could barely blink.

If the impossible was actually possible...then what should come next?

As Trump spoke, Pete dragged his gaze from the television to the mirror. Disgust overwhelmed him as he assessed his reflection. His eyes were red, his clothes were wrinkled. His five o’ clock shadow had, it seemed, darkened his entire face.

The JFK poster hung over his shoulder.

For what felt like the first time that day, he straightened his spine. With a sweep of his arm he pushed the empty beer bottles off the edge of the desk and into the recycling bin beside it. They shattered with a quick, glassy, deafening din. The sound was so loud that - for a moment, at least - it drowned out the voice on the television.

* * *

_If you're at a roundabout and there is someone coming from your left, yield for them. Stay alert and keep each other safe_. - [Chasten Glezman, Twitter, October 25, 2016](https://twitter.com/Chas10Buttigieg/status/790955190513831936)


	5. September 18, 2019: South Bend, Indiana

Cradling a coffee mug in his hands, Chasten gazed at his husband through fragrant rising steam.

They sat at opposite ends of their living room couch, legs stretched into each other’s laps. The leaves outside were just beginning to turn crunchy and gold, and the new morning air billowing through the curtain felt crisp against the skin. He had made a habit of leaving the windows cracked lately. The windows don’t open at the White House.

“Let’s break the rule,” he said.

“What rule,” Pete said. He had one binder balanced in his hand, a second binder on his lap, a third on the sofa back, a pen tucked behind his ear, and the New York Times spread open across their legs like a blanket. Somehow, against all odds, he was synthesizing information from the arrangement, because he reached over to the coffee table and absentmindedly picked up the highlighter they’d been sharing.

Chasten took another long, slow sip and modulated his voice. “You know what rule.” He used his eyes to trace a gentle, serpentine path along his husband’s hairline, the curve of his ear, the freshly smooth jawline. He willed the laserlike irises to look up.

When they didn’t, he bit his lip, disappointed, and set the mug on its coaster. As he did, he noticed the Washington Post that he’d just tossed to the floor in frustration. Glancing at Pete to make sure he wasn’t being watched, he set his phone to silent and texted Lis.

_ Thoughts on Post theater story? _

“The rule was your idea,” Pete said, two minutes late, and still reading.

Chasten looked up. He leaned forward. “I instituted that rule before I became starved for human touch.”

No reaction.

He was just about to shamelessly start tracing the vein on the back of his husband’s hand when his phone lit up with Lis’s answer.

_ Dumb as shit but in your wheelhouse _

He sighed, then texted back with irritated, dramatic panache.

_ Always nice to be appreciated, Smith _

“I can’t help you until I’m done with my reading,” Pete said. He looked up and saw the pile of binders still stacked on the coffee table. His tone became accusatory. “You haven’t even finished yours.”

“God, a decade of abstinence does wonders for the work ethic,” Chasten muttered.

A dark look was flashed and a change of subject mandated. “What did you think of the Maguire story in the Times?” Pete asked.

Chasten willed himself to focus. “Which story?”

Suddenly, Buddy. He appeared with great force directly on top of their kneecaps. Both humans sighed, but they wordlessly coordinated the dog-shifting, Pete pushing, Chasten pulling, both hoisting. Despite Buddy’s initial protestations, he was soon snorting, and eventually snoring, on the back of the sofa. The binders were calmly repositioned in an even more inconvenient arrangement.

“The whistleblower story,” Pete said as soon as they were settled again, as if no interruption had occurred. “Did you read it?”

“Yeah. Seemed pretty opaque.”

“Read it again.”

Chasten shrugged and grabbed the wrinkled, torn, and newly snotty Times. “What was the headline?”

“Acting Intelligence Chief Refuses to Testify, Prompting Standoff With Congress,” Pete replied from memory primly.

“Freak,” Chasten muttered, restlessly scanning the columns until he found it. He read the article more carefully than he had at dawn. Once he did, a single sentence hit him like a needle of adrenaline pierced directly into the heart. Suddenly he was sitting bolt upright and reading aloud. “_ Mr. Schiff told CBS that Mr. Maguire had told him he was not providing the complaint ‘because he is being instructed not to, that this involved a higher authority, someone above’ the director of national intelligence, a cabinet position. _”

“There’s one person above the director of national intelligence,” Pete said. “And he’s not particularly renowned for his intelligence.”

Chasten began flipping through the pages, as if the answers to his sudden dozens of questions might somehow be there. “How did I miss this? What’s going on?”

Pete shrugged. “It would be irresponsible to speculate.”

“What do I need to know? What’s the worst-case scenario here?”

“For us? Or for the country?”

“Well, either could prove relevant,” Chasten said, seasoning the words with sarcasm that he regretted would go unappreciated.

“It’s too early to say for sure, but this could be a sign that the president has been soliciting foreign aid for his re-election campaign. If that’s true, then this story becomes about all of the candidates. The consequences for media strategy would be profound. You should be prepared.”

“You were the intelligence analyst. How do you think this could play out?”

Chasten tried to make his voice as casual as possible, but Pete noticed its ever-increasing speed and pitch: his personal telltale signs of trepidation. Accordingly, and to Chasten's relief, Pete set down the highlighter and stepped into the role of professor. He did so with an ease so authoritative that Chasten would have wanted to punch him had he not been so fuckable.

“Speaking broadly, it could go something like this. He’ll ask a foreign government for information that will hurt a campaign, or he’ll ask one of his goons to. There will be a payment or some kind of policy put into place that will benefit the foreign country. In return, that foreign country will hand over damaging information to the Trump campaign, or, depending on the exact nature of the information, directly to the U.S. government itself, where it will be weaponized. Barr is king at DOJ, so there’s no hope of a Mueller-style special counsel. Additionally, if any issues associated with the case are ever brought before the Supreme Court, Justice Kavanaugh’s loyalty to the president would be a concern. We’ll see what Schiff and company can do in the House, but we have to be prepared for the possibility that they may do less than what we would like. And voila: 2016 on steroids. In fact, if the cards fall right, the 2020 elections become basically illegitimate, accelerating the world’s descent into full-bore fascism, just as the planet nears the tipping point on climate change.”

Chasten stared.

Pete shrugged. “Looks like someone might be regretting going on a date with a cute mayor from South Bend.”

“There’s also a line in there about how I got more than I bargained for,” Chasten muttered.

“We both did."

Chasten hesitated. “Do you seriously think we’re up for this?”

“Yes.”

Another hesitation. “Why?”

Pete set down the highlighter and looked up with an icy blue stare. It made a heat spread along the back of Chasten’s neck.

“Do you want this?” Pete said to him, enunciating. “Or do you not want this?”

“I’m sitting on a couch studying binders when I could be fucking my husband. Take a guess.”

“I'm serious. If you have any doubts whatsoever about your capability to excel at this, then you have to tell me about them now. We are running out of time to quit, and I am completely incapable of doing this without you. You cannot leave me stranded. If you love me, I need you to promise that you will _never leave me stranded_.”

“Jesus, Peter, I didn’t ask for a bad Sorkin monologue. I want this. I want you. I just… Let me feel some emotions once in a while.” He steeled himself with a sullen sip of coffee. “One of us has to.”

Pete shot a warning glare and his grim one-sided smile, but went back to reading without retort.

They were silent for a long while after that. Chasten sat motionless, centering himself in the moment, appreciating the simple act of holding the mug, noticing its weight, absorbing its warmth, feeling how the heat of the ceramic made his fingers tingle. He watched Pete jot down notes, furrow his brow, highlight and circle and underline. He couldn’t help but notice the new salt and pepper hairs springing up around his husband’s temples. Chasten remembered how back in January, he had made a note in his master calendar to dye a few of the short fine hairs in a very subtle way after Labor Day, if the stress wasn’t yet taking the optically appropriate toll. Not surprisingly, Pete had been less than enthusiastic, even after Chasten had patiently explained, and then re-explained, the sound reasoning behind his position. _ It lends maturity without aging you. It shows you’re a hard worker and taking this seriously. It’s physical proof that you can feel things. _Finally Chasten had backed off (a man in his position has to pick his battles), suggesting they revisit the topic. But they never needed to. By a certain point this summer, he’d been able to cross the note off his calendar, equally guilty and pleased, but also guilty that he was pleased.

Chasten's eyes slid from his husband’s hair down his face down to his shoulder down to his forearm down to his watch. An idea suddenly occurred to him. He set down the coffee, leaned forward, unfastened the watchband, and pressed two fingers on the underside of Pete’s wrist. Pete glanced down, instinctively understanding what was happening, and rolled up his sleeve, extending a silent invitation. Chasten could still feel his own pulse racing in his neck, spiking from the implications of the Times story and the blind terror of the responsibility ahead. But Pete’s heartbeat remained slow and even and steady as ever.

“I will never understand how you stay so calm,” Chasten finally said by way of diagnosis.

“I went to war,” Pete said, pulling the sleeve back down.

Those four casual words suddenly unleashed an unexpected heat of heart-pounding protectiveness. “Come here,” Chasten said, hearing a hitch in his voice, pulling at Pete's collar, and suddenly the precariously balanced binders were tumbling to the floor.

But before anything could happen, Pete’s phone buzzed. Chasten reached out to push it off the coffee table, but Pete caught it right before it hit the floor.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Chasten moaned.

“It’s Lis; I have to read it,” Pete said, struggling to sit up.

“Just for that timing alone, if her phone is ever hacked, we are leaving her out to fucking dry.”

“We'll see. In a battle between Lis and Russian intelligence, I’m putting my money on Lis.” He read her text silently a few times, but his brow furrowed; it was clear he couldn't make anything of it. He turned to Chasten. “‘Sorry that C’s lecturing you on Thornton Wilder, but he’s making good points’? What's she talking about?”

“Oh,” he said, smoothing down his ruffled hair and trying to quickly think about how to best phrase what he had to say. “Well. There was an article in the Post today. They sent a...theater critic out to compare the candidates to...um, different plays.”

A frozen quarter-smile came over Pete’s face, and he blinked several times in quick polite disbelieving succession.

Chasten understood this body language all too well. “Here," he ordered, pulling a throw pillow on his lap and patting it. "Lie down. Give me your phone.”

Pete obeyed, but with all the hesitancy of a patient slipping into a dentist's chair.

“This is from New Hampshire,” Chasten said. “_ Soon enough the Democratic mayor from the Midwest with the tongue-tying surname, Pete Buttigieg, appears before us. He sports snug-fitting blue jeans _ \- and you are welcome, Post and pervs alike - _ a white long-sleeve shirt folded neatly up to the elbows and, for me, a genial decency reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town.’” _

Pete was looking longingly at the policy binders splayed open on the floor. “Is that all?”

“He calls you ‘preternaturally mild-mannered.’ ‘Pete the Imperturbable.’”

“I like imperturbable.”

“Yeah, that’s promising. But he also said this. _ Who is Mayor Pete? Of all the presidential candidates I’ve followed so far, as a theater critic examining the distinct performance styles of a Democratic cast that includes Kamala D. Harris, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren _…”

“We’re not a cast,” Pete mumbled.

“It’s a metaphor, babe.” Chasten began stroking Pete’s hair with the kind of tenderness he usually reserved for comforting the dogs during their vaccinations. “_ Buttigieg struck me as hardest to get to know through his public performances _ ... _ Over the course of eight events, I learned surprisingly little about his personal life, what makes him tick and even where he grew up… _”

“I should write a bestselling memoir on the subject.”

"_ The gaze of almost unsettling sincerity that he trains on an interlocutor has a habit, though, of making Mayor Pete seem a bit studied - an even-tempered robot. On a stage, like the portable one in Hancock, he tends to repeat the same gestures over and over, like an actor with only a rudimentary tool kit (where is Chasten when he needs him?). _”

Pete snatched at his phone. “It does _not_ say that.”

It did, in fact, say that. Chasten watched helplessly as Pete read and then re-read the paragraph in question. He wondered what Pete's pulse might be if he tried taking it now.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Pete’s voice was incredulous. “I’m running for president, not auditioning for a remake of House of fucking Cards.”

“Well,” Chasten said, gently pressing his husband's tense shoulders back down onto the pillow. “We’ll make some adjustments. Lis and I will probably brainstorm some anecdotes. I’ll work up some more acting exercises, we'll talk some more about how to use cameras, and - ”

“More acting exercises? Doesn't anyone understand the gravity of what is happening right now? We don’t have time for this optics bullsh - ”

Chasten’s hands flew to his husband’s chin, and, with a quick firm motion, he grabbed it and forced Pete's mouth shut mid-word. He then leaned over him. For a long moment he stared directly into his husband’s trapped, upside-down eyes.

“Do you want this?” Chasten said to him, enunciating. “Or do you not want this?”

Pete blinked once, hard, but had no reply.

Chasten brushed his lips against his ear. “Then make time for my bullshit, Peter,” he whispered, “because my bullshit is the only reason you’re polling above Delaney. Don’t value your brain over my instincts. We need both. We need each other. We are going to have to play this game to change it. And you know it.”

Pete sighed. Chasten chose to interpret that sigh as an unspoken agreement, so he let go of Pete’s face and trailed his fingers back up to his hair. He found himself petting, while simultaneously inspecting the length and quality of, the gray hairs. He realized he ought to watch them closely. They shouldn’t spread too fast.

Pete rubbed his jaw. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to swear at you,” he said.

“Good. I didn't think you did.” Chasten began scrolling through the Post article one last time before handing back the phone. “By the way, if you ever need a quick pick-me-up, the comments on this one are hilarious. _ He likes Beethoven and comes across as the straightest arrow any gay man could ever be _.”

Pete snorted. “Do I have something to prove?”

“According to Washington Post user ‘expatriot1’, you do indeed.”

“Then fuck the rule,” Pete said. "Well, for ten minutes, anyway,” and at that, Chasten melted, with a wave of overwhelming gratitude, into their kiss.

But not before clumsily and one-handedly crumpling the New York Times page and tossing it as far across the room as he could throw it, which ended up being not very far at all.

* * *

_I never once saw the mask of calm come off. He never seems to get steamed up, rarely even raises his voice... So maybe, you start to think, it’s not a mask._ \- [Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/09/18/posts-theater-critic-is-reviewing-performances-democratic-candidates-this-installment-pete-buttigieg-barnstorms-new-hampshire-with-homespun-virtues-reminiscent-our-town/), September 18, 2019


	6. October 7, 2016: South Bend, Indiana

He strode directly into the raw gray wind, the frost of the new season chilling him to the bone. Desperate to keep warm, he pulled his messenger bag up tight against the buttons of his double-breasted coat.

A security guard waved him through the metal detector just as the lobby elevator doors were about to close. He dashed over and pried them open, to the politely disgruntled shock of those within. “Sorry,” he mumbled to either side. “Sorry.”

The elevator rose in unbearably short lurches. They stopped at the assessor’s office, the county health department, the prosecutor’s office. Finally, by the fourteenth floor, he was alone. He took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and began to frantically pound at the door open button.

Pete’s scheduler smiled at him as he passed by. “Hi, Mr. Glezman. The mayor’s on a call with a representative of Governor Pence, so if you could just take a - ”

“I’m _so_ sorry,” he said, hand already on the doorknob, voice desperately warm with the sincerity of his apology, “I need to talk with Peter,” and he pushed past into his boyfriend’s office, ignoring all of the sudden curious swivels of the heads of the interns and staffers.

Early in their relationship, they had agreed that Chasten would never drop by the County-City Building unannounced. There was a time and a place for the kinds of conversations they had about politics, but that time and that place was never at the office, and certainly not during business hours. This was the first time he’d ever broken the promise, and he wasn’t sure how Pete would react.

When he swept through the door, Pete’s brow furrowed in confusion, but only for a moment. Chasten prayed their shared trust would redeem him. It did. “Say,” Pete said, “something urgent has just come up. I’ll call you back as soon as I can,” and he dropped his desk phone into its cradle.

Chasten closed the door behind him. “Mike Schmuhl is going to call you any minute,” he said, “and he is going to be wrong.”

“Why are you here?”

“Why wouldn’t I be here?”

“What?”

“You haven’t seen it yet, have you?”

Pete watched, disbelieving, as Chasten dragged a chair from in front of his desk over to the door. He hoisted it up under the knob and kicked at the legs to make sure it was secure.

Then, like a prop in a magic trick, Pete’s cell phone began to ring. When he saw who it was, he looked warily toward Chasten, but swiped to accept the call. “Hello, Mike?”

Chasten took the phone from Pete’s hand, turned it to speaker, and set it on the desk between them. “We’re both here and I’ve got a chair in front of the door,” he said. “Nobody can hear us.”

“Good,” Mike said.

Pete considered the phone, his boyfriend’s wind-touseled hair, and the chair jammed beneath the doorknob. Behind Chasten, outside the window, tufts of feathers began fluttering in front of the gray panorama: the building’s resident peregrine falcon had just caught a pigeon.

“I’m lost,” he said.

Pete being lost was always Chasten’s cue to take charge. “I have it here, Mike. He hasn’t seen it yet.” As he spoke, he whipped off his gloves, withdrew a tablet from his messenger bag, and tapped furiously at it. Finally, he extended it to Pete. His expression was blank, but it had a tight-lipped, almost religious solemnity. “This came out about twenty minutes ago.”

Pete accepted the strangely offered gift with bewildered trepidation. On the screen was a video beneath a Washington Post headline: _“Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.”_

“Shit,” he muttered. Chasten leaned over and pressed play and straightened up and walked away.

A bus began to crawl across the screen.

Over the next three minutes and six seconds, Chasten slowly undid each button on his black coat, sliding it off his shoulders and draping it across the chair. At the mention of Tic Tacs, he ambled over to the window, light blue eyes appraising the lowering sun and the lengthening shadows. The American flag on top of the building across the street was stretched taut, shivering in the wind. He leaned his forehead against the cold glass to try to see a sign of the falcon’s box just above them. He could see nothing, but there was a small speckle of blood and feather on the sill, attesting to the kill.

Eons later, when the video was finally over, it felt as if the room had been sucked dry of sound, of air, of time itself.

Pete set the tablet on the desk and clasped his hands together. His knuckles turned white.

“My God,” he finally said.

“It’s over,” Mike said.

“It has to be.”

The three of them were paralyzed for a long while.

Mike was the first one to break their shared stupor. “Look,” he said. “I hate to move past moral outrage so quickly, but others don’t have the same scruples we do. I’d be a bad friend if I didn’t recommend thinking about what you want next.”

“Well, at the moment, I’ve got my hands full with the city.”

“When you’re climbing up a ladder, you see all the rungs.”

“South Bend isn’t a rung.”

“Pete.”

He hesitated, reassessing. “South Bend isn’t _just_ a rung,” he finally allowed.

“That’s better. Now, this is aiming very high, but I think you should consider making a move for transportation or HUD secretary. Follow Castro’s lead. Elected mayor in 2009, then five years later, he’s in Washington doing good work. Shortlisted for VP this cycle. He’s going to be formidable in ‘24. It’s a smart playbook. I think something like it could work for you.”

“There’s still a lot of work I want to do here.”

“Understood, and I appreciate that. I’m just saying, if you _are_ interested in anything else, be interested in it now.”

Pete glanced up. Chasten hadn’t moved from the window, and the neat crisp back of his gingham shirt was inscrutable.

“Remember,” Mike said, “if you don’t check off the right boxes before ‘24, your inexperience becomes a major vulnerability. Especially with the new folks that Clinton is about to bring on; they’re going to evolve into your competitors, and fast. The clock’s ticking.”

“I haven’t ruled out governor in ‘20.”

“I’d also recommend a hard look at the 2nd district.”

“Or we could run for president,” Chasten said.

The room fell silent.

“Well, eventually, yes,” Mike said.

“Not eventually. In 2020. Against him.”

Chasten turned from the window. He looked at Pete. They looked at each other.

Suddenly Mike's voice sounded very far away. “Sorry, Chasten; the phone’s on the fritz. Sounded like you said ‘run for president.’”

“Because I did."

“Did you even _see_ the video?”

“I’ve seen it three times. And each of those times has shaved off a new part of my soul.”

“He’s not coming back from this.”

Chasten strode forward to speak directly down into the phone. “But he’s not _not_ coming back. Donald Trump is a predator. Do either of you know any predators?”

Mike said nothing. Pete glanced away. Chasten continued.

“Hurting vulnerable people brings men like this joy. In fact, it brings them strength. The more they’re attacked, the fiercer they get. And there are a lot of voters out there who will like that. People are angry right now. People want a bully.”

“They might want a bully,” Pete said, “but they’ll see through a con artist.”

“But that’s the thing,” Chasten said. “Sometimes we’re dumb. _Sometimes we don’t_.”

“Look,” Pete said, “I understand why this video would be so upsetting to you, but let’s not let...personal experiences cloud political - ”

A flash of fury crossed Chasten’s face. He sat down on the desk to loom over Pete, completely ignoring the paperwork scattered haphazardly across the surface. “Peter, what did you tell me after Hillary’s South Bend rally?”

Pete sighed. He picked up the tablet, tilted it away from Chasten, and watched the video again, on mute. He gave no answer, so Chasten continued.

“Can't remember? Well, I do. I remember exactly. You said, ‘It’s so strange that no one gave her a standing ovation.’ And I agreed with you. Well, what if it’s not strange? What if this sociopath wins? What happens then?”

“You have an unbearably dark view of the American electorate.” Pete winced. “God, this is obscene.”

“Say, Pete,” Mike said, “I want to be delicate about this, because you know I love you both, but I’d caution against taking political advice from a 27-year-old kid with a theater degree. No offense meant, Chasten, truly. You’re a great guy. But this is just a hobby for you. It’s a job for us.”

This was the wrong thing to say; it immediately triggered a fast, defiant, perfectly enunciated monologue. “Maybe I’m just a 27-year-old kid with a theater degree, but I’m a 27-year-old kid with a theater degree _from Michigan_. And I finished that theater degree _in Wisconsin_. And maybe I don’t make my money spinning pretty stories for politicians, Mike, but I’m enough of a _hobbyist_ to know that if Clinton loses Michigan and Wisconsin, this thing is over, and that marmalade bastard is going to end up furniture-shopping for the White House.”

Uneasy silence.

“I know people back home who aren’t voting for her,” Chasten pushed. “Heck, we all know people _here_ who aren’t voting for her. So what if - ”

“Those are very anecdotal experiences,” Mike said. “If you look at the polls - ”

Chasten swiped up the phone from the desk and started to shout directly into it. “A tape just dropped of the Republican nominee for the American presidency bragging about sexually assaulting other human beings, and you two are sitting here discussing it like you’re a couple of tenured philosophy professors on summer break. Don’t you understand? The rules are broken! The playbook is gone! He shredded it!”

“That is a completely unfair characterization of - ”

Pete stood up and gently took the phone from Chasten’s hand. “Everyone calm down. Chasten, please remember, Mike and I go back to the first day of ninth grade. He’s the reason why Donnelly kept his House seat in an absolute bloodbath of a cycle, and his professional advice is both valued and valuable. And Mike, I’ll remind you that Chasten has the best political instincts of anyone I’ve ever met. As long as we’re together, he’s going to be a part of this process, and his presence is a gift. Each of us has a role to play, okay? We’re on the same team here.”

Mike was silent. Chasten turned his head and looked out the window; he pursed his lips, but he said nothing.

“How about this,” Pete finally offered. “We can’t know what the rest of October is going to bring, so - ”

“I can’t imagine an October surprise bigger than this one,” Mike muttered.

“Still,” Pete said. “Let’s keep all doors open for as long as possible. But let’s also make sure that we know exactly what’s beyond all of them. We need to gather information. That way, when the moment is right, we’ll be able to make things happen, and quickly.”

Chasten turned back toward Pete, voice tight. “If we’re a team, then I’m bringing on another player. It can’t keep being two against one like this. You’re too alike.”

Mike’s tone turned lofty. “Add whoever you want, Pete. Sorry to cut you off here, but I’ve got to go; I’m already twenty minutes late for a client. Just don’t put off decision-making for too long. There are tons of talented young liberals out there, and as of tonight, they’re all going to be jockeying into position. You’re too good not to be in that lineup.”

“I appreciate it, Mike. We’ll talk soon.”

“Good night, Pete. Chasten.”

When he hung up, the pensive quiet that descended on the room felt darker than the clouds outside.

There was nothing left to say, or at least nothing that could be said.

After a few minutes, Chasten stood, trudged to the door, and yanked the chair out from under the knob. He was so pathetically dejected, stiffly carrying the chair under his arm like it was a misbehaving toddler, that Pete was about to crack a joke, but just in time he saw the tears streaking down Chasten’s face, and he stopped and he said nothing.

Chasten set down the chair and sat down in it. He retained his composure, at first. But under Pete’s impenetrably icy blue gaze, his shoulders began to shake. A very soft half-strangled cry escaped before he choked it back down.

Pete watched him.

The office Kleenex box was buried beneath legal pads and opened envelopes and half-read reports.

He dug under the papers, pulled out the box, and kneeled in front of Chasten.

Chasten whispered a question, asked him what he was doing.

He didn’t answer.

He took off Chasten’s glasses, carefully folding them at the hinges and tucking them in the pocket of his suit jacket.

He took Chasten’s right hand into his, brushing his thumb back and forth against its knuckles.

He used his left hand to pull a tissue from the box and pat dry the tears.

He worked methodically.

He said nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” Chasten breathed.

“Don’t be.”

When the tears were dried, he took the glasses from his pocket, re-opened them, and returned them gingerly to Chasten’s face. He bit his lip as he concentrated, examining the angle of the lenses and the position of the nose pads, like an optometry student taking a final exam.

Once he was satisfied, he smoothed the hairs that both the glasses and the cold October wind had mussed.

“Look at me,” Pete said.

Chasten did. He looked at Pete. It felt like the first time he’d ever seen him, and that, in turn, felt like the first time he’d ever been seen.

“Those motherfuckers all deserve to burn in goddamn hell.”

Chasten tried to reply to this. He didn’t. Instead, he leaned forward, magnetized to kiss this man’s face, but just as their foreheads were about to touch, a realization came from somewhere outside of himself that, kiss or no kiss, this moment and this memory would mean the same sacred thing always, no matter what they did inside of it, because with this man it was never just about his kiss, because with this man it was always about his love. So he stopped just short, and just sat on the edge, and they just sat on the edge, just being, and just breathing.

One smiled, then the other, their eyes closed.

“Look at us,” Pete whispered.

“So shamelessly wanton.”

“Pence’s worst nightmare.”

A realization. Chasten’s eyes opened. “It won’t happen, but I just thought of - ”

“Please don’t think of anything besides this.”

“- Who you’d be running against if Trump was impeached.”

* * *

_Quote of the night from @realDonaldTrump : "how stupid is our country." Smarter than you think, sir._ \- [Pete Buttigieg, Twitter, October 9, 2016](https://twitter.com/petebuttigieg/status/785301997377335296)


	7. September 25, 2019: South Bend, Indiana

Three determined knocks echoed through the big old white house. The hinges creaked as the front door opened and closed; a cacophony of excited barking and jingling dog collars rang out like bells.

“Where are you two?” a voice called.

“We’re in the upstairs bathroom, Mom.” Pete was sprawled across tiny hexagonal floor tiles, household toolbox open, toilet gone, plumbing exposed, forehead wrinkled in confusion. Chasten leaned against the doorframe, content to watch the jeans-clad problem-solving from above.

“Are you decent?” Anne asked, her footsteps ascending the staircase.

“Never,” Chasten answered.

“In more ways than one,” Pete said, “you are not helping.”

Chasten smiled. When Anne appeared beside him, he hugged her sideways. Her bouncy white curls brushed the side of his cheek; he could smell a distant trace of mint shampoo.

“What’s going on here?” she asked, surveying the scattered pliers and wrenches.

“He’s replacing the toilet, and I’m mocking him,” Chasten said.

“I see.”

“This circular part - ” Pete muttered, tossing it down with more force than necessary.

“The closet flange?” Anne said.

He took a deep breath but accepted the correction. “The _ closet flange _ needs to be level with the floor, but this pipe coming up is too long, and even if I sawed it down, the tile would still make it sit too high, and - ”

Anne interrupted. “You need a special cutter wheel drill bit.” She bent down to point and offer educational gestures. “Cut carefully from the inside, just below the surface. After that, everything will sit neat and flush.”

Pete sat back and looked at her. “How do you know that?”

She smiled and patted his hair before standing up straight. “How are you still surprised by what I know?”

Pete sighed. He had no answer to that.

“Is this what we’re meeting about?” she asked. “A closet flange? I could have told you all this over the phone.”

“No, Mom; I didn’t call a campaign meeting to discuss our plumbing.”

Pete’s phone, balanced on the edge of the sink, began to ring. “That said, I can certainly ask Lis if we should add it to the agenda,” Chasten said, grabbing it.

“I’m advancing a motion that we not do that.”

“Motion denied.” Chasten answered the Facetime call, and suddenly Lis was on the screen, inexplicably screaming into one phone while typing on a laptop. He kept talking, knowing she’d somehow hear him anyway. “Smith! Before we get started, what’s this circular thing next to Pete?”

She hung up the extra phone with a flurry of fuck-yous, threw it aside, then assessed. “The flange?” she asked. “Oh my fucking God. Did he not know what it was?”

“Let’s move this into the office,” Pete said, standing up.

“Peter Paul _motherfucking_ Montgomery! You’ve lectured me about smart sewers until I wanted to _drown_ in one; how do you not know what a closet flange is?”

Chasten tilted the phone toward Anne. “Anne, say good afternoon to Lis.”

“Lovely to see you, Anne! Fair warning, I swear a lot in these high-level meetings.”

“And the low-level meetings,” Chasten said.

Anne’s smile was serene. “I’d argue that profanity is among the most expressive elements of language.”

“Then,” said Pete, standing up and dusting off his jeans, “you’ll find Lis to be very expressive. Shall we?”

* * *

The extra bedroom that had once served as a supplementary mayoral office and JFK shrine had evolved into the campaign’s informal Situation Room: a place where only the most sensitive topics were discussed, in meetings that were purposefully devoid of minutes. Despite its newfound importance, the office was still largely unfurnished, aside from Pete’s childhood desk and a few broken-down folding chairs they'd stolen from campaign headquarters.

“This secrecy is fit for an espionage thriller,” Anne remarked as she and Chasten sat down across from Pete.

“We’re hiring Helen Mirren to play you in the movie adaptation,” Chasten said.

“Oh, I can see that,” Lis said as Chasten propped up the phone against a stack of yellowed Joyce biographies.

The light pleasantries continued, but Chasten could see that Pete wasn’t hearing any of them. Instead, he was distracted by the mirror on the opposite wall, looking at the JFK poster above his shoulder, and the backs of Anne and Chasten’s heads.

Even after they’d all settled in, and an uncomfortable quiet had descended, Pete didn’t speak.

“I don’t know where to start,” he finally said.

“Then allow me,” Chasten said, and he stood and purposefully perched on the edge of the desk, blocking Pete’s view of the reflections, forcing his focus. “Anne," he asked, "have you ever wondered why Peter’s career took off after we started dating?”

“You have no subtlety,” Pete muttered.

Lis ignored him. “Or why he hired a foul-mouthed communications director from Manhattan a few weeks after Trump won?”

Chasten again. “Or why he ran for DNC chair immediately after that?”

Lis. “Or why he finally got around to finishing his memoir manuscript?”

Chasten. “Or why he started wearing pants that fit?”

The quickly fired questions hung in the air. Anne was taken aback by the tennis match. “I assumed it was because you made him happy,” she finally said.

Chasten leaned in. “I made him more than happy, Anne. I made him _him_.” He stood. “We’re not just a personal partnership; we’re a political partnership. We allude to it, but we never elucidate it. Modern politics is theater, and I teach theater. Everything that matters, he takes care of. Everything that shouldn’t matter, I do. Together, we make things happen that we can’t make happen on our own.” He hesitated, surprised at the speed of his own monologue. “Does that make sense?”

Anne’s eyes briefly narrowed, lending a faraway expression that seemed bizarrely familiar until he realized, with a chill, that it was identical to his husband's. But once her brain retrieved the answer, her piercing gaze returned.

“It makes a great deal of sense,” she said.

“You aren’t surprised?”

“No. You’re describing the only kind of relationship that would make Peter happy. As I recall, when he began his first term as mayor, his fondest wish was to have a queen to pawn his ceremonial duties off to.”

“Terminology, Mom.”

She ignored him. “So no, such an...arrangement doesn’t surprise me.” She paused, pondering. “Besides, I know firsthand; if you’re a teacher…” She smiled. “Peter is exceptionally tempting clay.”

“I’m not an art project.”

“I don’t know that you weren’t.” Anne glanced up at Chasten. “Or aren’t.”

Chasten sat back down. He turned his chair toward her and leaned forward. “That’s the thing, though,” he said, with an earnestness he prayed was disarming. “We’re all art, every one of us. Take the politics-as-theater metaphor one step further. If the Trump presidency is a reality show, then Pete’s campaign is a play. A play depends on carefully crafted characters to tell the story and push it forward. So we’re all playing characters here.” He nodded toward the phone. “Take Lis. Lis is loud. She’s ruthless. She’s romantically reckless. She tells Peter’s story by being his textbook foil.”

Lis picked up the thread. “Whereas Chasten is the charming extrovert with a heart of gold, who - kill me now - _Pete made whole_. His role is to convince people that Pete’s composing love sonnets behind closed doors, when anyone with eyes can see he’s probably writing theses on wastewater treatment. In Norwegian.”

Anne nodded slowly as she took in this new information, assessing it, inspecting it, weighing it. Finally she asked, carefully - “You describe yourselves as characters. Are those characters...real?” A pause. “Are they honest?”

“Donald Trump is the president,” Pete said. “In comparison, I’m George Washington; Chasten’s the cherry tree; and Lis is the hatchet.”

Lis piped up. “If it makes you feel any better, Anne, my volume, ruthlessness, and romantic recklessness are all very much real, and you can ask Eliot Spitzer for the receipts. I may be playing a character, but I also _am_ a character.”

“It’s curating,” Chasten said.

“It’s emphasizing parts of ourselves to tell the specific story that we want to tell, to serve a purpose greater than ourselves,” Pete said.

“It’s fucking politics,” Lis said.

Chasten cringed a little at the bluntness, but he couldn’t argue with it. “So as our play goes on,” he said, “ideally we’ll draw on a wider and wider circle of characters to tell Peter’s story, to show why he deserves support, to make more people love him. But right now, we’re short on characters who humanize him. And family members tend to do the best job at humanizing.”

“Obviously Chasten’s mom is out, for health and Rhyan-related reasons,” Lis said.

Anne turned to ice. “Obviously.”

“Rhyan’s out of the spotlight for now; I’ve seen to that. But if we want to keep him there, we need another family member to vouch for Pete. And God rest Joe’s soul, you’re the only close family he has left.”

At this, Chasten felt her waver. It was his moment to pounce. “So,” he said, forcing nonchalance. “The big question is, are you interested in joining us?”

Anne’s expression became unreadable. She said nothing. He felt a bead of sweat coalesce on his forehead.

“You’d be supported every step of the way - ” he said.

Pete interrupted. “But you can’t have any reservations.”

Silence.

Pete clasped his hands together, too tight, until the blood drained from his fingers.

Finally Chasten took Anne’s hand in his. Her skin was cool and dry. “I can only imagine how bizarre and terrifying this must sound,” he said, voice sweet and smooth and soothing. “None of us will blame you one bit if you run out of here screaming. Whatever you choose to do, we would never love you any less. We promise.”

“Do you see me running?” She gently pulled her hand away and sat up even straighter than she had been before. “How would you suggest I...be curated?”

“That’s what we’re here to do. I’d probably start by asking a few questions.”

“Such as…?”

“Well…” Chasten took a breath. “Things like, why did you have Peter? What did it mean to you to become a parent? What kinds of things did parenthood teach you? Etcetera.” He hesitated. “I know that’s all very personal, but this entire process is very personal. That’s why it’s just us four today.”

For a long while, Anne didn’t answer.

They heard untrimmed dog nails milling around outside the office door.

“This isn't a test,” Chasten said gently. “There are no wrong answers.”

“But what if there are?” she asked.

Chasten looked to Pete, suddenly helpless.

Pete sighed. “What she means is, I was a mistake,” he said.

Immediately Anne was aghast. “Whatever gave you that impression?”

“Wasn’t it obvious?” Pete’s tone was just on the edge of sullenness. “Your careers were always the center of your lives, and you only had one child. Connect the dots.”

Anne turned back to Chasten. He made sure never to break eye contact with her as she spoke. “He’s wrong. We thought we wanted a child, and we did. But looking back with...the wisdom of age…” She paused a moment to organize her thoughts. “Maybe we didn’t want a child as much as we wanted a live-in student to teach at for eighteen years. Raw clay to mold.”

She looked at Pete apologetically. He stared back.

“Now, I’m not saying we didn’t do an excellent job,” she said. “You always made it easy. But when your son starts slamming his fingers in kitchen cabinet drawers, just because he hasn’t yet memorized all three movements of a Clementi sonata…” She didn’t finish the sentence. “He turned into a pretty tchotchke for everyone to admire. Maybe we should have done more to curb his ambition. Maybe in some fundamental way we failed. I don’t know.”

Chasten’s eyes flickered back and forth between the two. “Good parents are always second-guessing themselves.” He hesitated. “Right?”

“A pretty tchotchke?” Pete asked.

Lis interrupted the argument before it began. “You could use that piano story, Anne. Just make it ninety percent less creepy.”

“Absolutely,” Chasten said. “There are a few great talking points in there. He’s always been very responsible. He’s always overachieved. He’s always learned new things very quickly.”

The descriptions made Anne smile. “That’s our Peter.”

“It certainly is. Do you see, Anne? We’re not lying. We’re just telling his story, the best way we know how.”

“I think I do see.”

Chasten realized he'd been holding his breath.

“I like this,” Lis announced. “Ask her some more. Humanize the living _fuck_ out of him.”

“Well.” He paused, thinking furiously. He’d prepared a long list of questions the night before, and all thirty of them were on the tip of his tongue, but for some reason, in the moment, he found himself drawn to others he hadn’t planned on asking. “What does it mean to see your son running such a historic campaign? How did you feel when he came out? When we got married?”

Anne took a moment before answering, composing full sentences before saying a word. “As far as his marriage goes,” she said, “you were clearly the best thing to ever happen to him. And this campaign proves it. Speaking more broadly, I feel…” She paused. “Pride. Intense pride.” She smiled at Pete as if he was the only man in the world; he didn’t return the gesture. “Love. Abiding love, for both of you. Sadness, that his father and I must have been so terribly preoccupied, that we didn’t see who he was earlier. Not that we didn’t give you plenty of chances to tell us. We did. But you’ve always hidden so much of yourself, Peter. Even to those you love the most.”

Pete looked at Chasten, but for the first time that afternoon, Chasten didn’t look back. When he asked his next question, his voice was small.

“Do you ever feel afraid?”

“Of course,” she said. She was matter-of-fact. “I read the ugly mail.”

Lis interjected. “‘Ugly mail’ is a fucking fabulous turn of phrase. Use it.”

Pete shifted in his seat. “I’ve told you, Mom, you don’t need to read - ”

“On the contrary, it’s essential that I read the mail.” Her voice suddenly began to project, as if she was lecturing to a classroom. “We are in positions of tremendous privilege, Peter. We all need to be reminded of the world’s ugliness and cruelty. If I want to read the mail sent to me, I will read the mail sent to me.”

Chasten found himself smiling. “You seem to be saying that a life with Peter is worth the heartache.”

Anne looked at Chasten. This time she reached out to take his hand. When she spoke, her voice was quiet again; she spoke to him and him alone.

“I wouldn’t trade him for the world,” she said. “Would you?”

* * *

Sometimes Chasten felt like a surgeon, expertly excising stories from his fellow humans’ hearts, and then transplanting those stories into the body of their campaign. On a normal day, they would have spent more time together analyzing Anne’s role, and plotting the surgery as a team, but this was no normal day. The impeachment inquiry against the president of the United States had finally begun. There was an implicit understanding that the Anne project would be his alone.

Impeachment was a pivotal moment that they’d been anticipating, secretly preparing for, pining for, in a way. He knew he should have sat through the entire meeting, because the day’s events would dictate the shape of the rest of the race. But after talking to Anne, he felt strangely claustrophobic. He had trouble watching Lis boil over like a too-full, too-hot cup of espresso, barking at them both that, unless they were _brave_ and _fearless_ and _bold_, the entire campaign ran a risk of suffocating, once the impeachment had started sucking all oxygen out of the media ecosystem. Moving forward, it would be more important than ever to differentiate themselves, to steal headlines and eyeballs and hearts, wherever there were headlines and eyeballs and hearts to be stolen. Pete and Lis had differing ideas as to how to go about the theft.

Finally Chasten excused himself and stepped into the empty bathroom and pushed open the window in search of fresh air. He wished he could splash cold water on his face, but he’d shut off the water valve.

He looked at himself in the mirror. Mid-argument with Lis, Pete had turned on the TV. The sound of news anchors reading transcript excerpts drifted through the walls, Trump’s words without Trump’s voice: _“The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that…”_

“I was honest,” Anne said, interrupting.

He looked at her. She was standing in the doorway, carrying her prim patent leather purse, jacket draped over her shoulders, ready to leave after her customary long good-bye to the dogs. They were at her feet, tails wagging, Buddy sneezing on her neatly ironed slacks.

“You were very honest,” Chasten said, smiling. “And we’re all thankful.”

“Then be honest with me.”

The smile faded. “What do you mean?”

She pet the dogs’ heads a final time, then slipped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. “The questions you asked today,” she said. She spoke with delicacy. “Were they just for the campaign? Or were they for more...personal purposes?”

He looked away from her and at the reflection of his face. He didn’t answer.

“If you asked them for personal purposes… Would you tell me?”

He took a very, very long time to answer. “No.”

“Would you even know if you’d asked them for personal purposes?”

He hung his head. She stepped beside him and gently tapped his chin so that he was looking up again.

“I recommend interrogating yourself,” she said. “Interrogate yourself as vigorously as we might interrogate a classroom.”

His voice was weak. “Yes.”

“Once you discern the answers, come to me. It is difficult work in the best of times, to shape a person. You will need assistance.” She paused. “No matter what the answers are.”

He studied her reflection for a moment - the cloud-white hair, neatly kept; the brightness in her blue eyes, and the sadness crinkled in the corners of them; the glasses she had taken off and was holding between elegant fingers.

“Do you think there are wrong answers?” His voice was close to a whisper. “I’ve wanted…” To his confusion, he couldn’t finish.

She smiled a strangely poignant smile and patted his cheek. “Chasten,” she said. “You love endlessly. Extravagantly. Everyone who you love will be alright. If it helps you win, do it. For Peter.” She paused. “And for yourself.”

He fought to keep his voice low. “But what kind of a monster chooses to drag an innocent person into this insanity? If Hunter Biden’s fair game, what else will be?” He hesitated. “If I’m going to be a monster, I don’t want to be one alone.”

“I’ve had a taste of alone this year,” she said. “I love you too much to subject you to it.”

He took a breath and nodded.

“My marriage and my career may be over, but my motherhood isn’t.”

She leaned against him and turned her head toward him, but never breaking eye contact with his reflection.

“Do you know, our Peter has wanted to be president ever since he knew what a president was,” she whispered in his ear. It was a question said as a statement. “Don’t let him down.”

She turned away and opened the bathroom door.

“I’ll - I’ll try to write up some talking points for you,” he blurted, suddenly needing to speak. “If you think it all through, and you still want to do this, Lis will set up some interviews. You’ll get all of the media training you could ever want. From me, if necessary. We’d never push you into the deep end. I promise.”

“Then I think we both have what we need,” she said. “I’ll text with any questions. But...be sure to text me with yours.” She pet the dogs again, and carefully stepped over them to descend the staircase. Her posture was so ramrod straight that she could have balanced a book on her head and not dropped it. “We’ll lean on each other’s shoulders!” she called. She chuckled. “How about that?”

“Thank you, Anne,” Chasten said. His throat tightened. “Just - thank you.”

She didn’t answer. The heavy front door opened and closed. The only sounds left were Pete and Lis’s muffled arguing voices, and through the walls, he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

He stood in the hall for a few minutes, watching the dogs watch him. Finally he recovered enough to kneel down and close his eyes and rest his forehead on Truman’s.

After a while, he sat up and leaned against the wall and took his phone from his pocket. He knew Lis wouldn’t pick up, but he called her number anyway and waited for it to go to voicemail. The silence between the rings felt interminable. The beep felt like an electric shock.

“I’ll keep this short; I don’t want Pete to hear,” he said. “Anne and I talked. You were right. She’s onboard with an adoption.”

* * *

_I can't. - [Chasten Buttigieg, Twitter, October 7, 2019](https://twitter.com/Chas10Buttigieg/status/1181257437736767489)_


	8. August 28, 2015: South Bend, Indiana

Their four intertwined footsteps creaked across the front porch. Peter dug into his pocket. It was dark out, but, ever-prepared, he’d left the porch light on. Chasten glanced surreptitiously at the back of his date's neck. It glistened with a thin layer of sweat.

Peter’s hand had a bit of a tremor to it, and it took two tries before he finally slipped the key into the lock.

Chasten waited patiently.

The air was heavy with the scent of warm summer flowers and encroaching dew of dusk. Away in the distance a dog barked. The headlights of a slow single car rolled up and then lazily past.

Finally Peter managed to push open the door. “After you,” he said, and Chasten stepped up and inside.

It felt like a shadowy time capsule from the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Tall ceilings, shapes of furniture, the odor of old oak and the sweet sting of Pine-Sol. A just-polished chandelier hung overhead, unlit but clearly intensely, quietly cared for.

Without turning around, Chasten reached back his hand and curled his fingers around Peter’s, which were occupied in locking the house back up. Even over his shoulder Chasten could hear the hitch of breath. He smiled to himself.

“Do you prefer Pete or Peter?” he asked the darkened entryway.

His date’s voice was a husk of its normal self. “Peter.”

He turned around. “Your house is beautiful, Peter.”

“Thank you.”

“Show it to me.”

“Yes.”

“But.” Chasten squeezed his fingers. “But don’t let go of my hand. And don’t turn on the lights.”

Peter’s voice was small. “We’ll fall.”

“We have the moonlight. And each other.”

Peter hesitated. For a brief moment Chasten wondered if he’d lost it, or lost him. But finally Peter stepped forward, and he didn't drop the hand. He began looking around as if he’d never seen his own house before.

“Which way’s the living room?” Chasten finally asked.

“Over here. But I don’t do much living.”

“You should change that.”

“That’s the goal.”

They wandered through the still, quiet, empty first floor, not speaking. One room in particular was unbearably elegant by moonlight, ringed by ceiling-high windows and a bay perfect for tall Christmas trees. In a place of honor stood an exquisite grand piano, all antique geometry and curves. The only photos displayed on it were of two distinguished figures who Chasten assumed were Peter’s parents. Either the vacuum of a personal life was genuine, or he was talented at crafting an illusion.

“I need to sit,” Peter said.

“We can sit,” Chasten said.

He pulled Peter over to the piano bench, and they both sat. The ivory keys before them took on a special luminescence in moonlight.

“How well do you play?” Chasten asked.

“Well enough.”

“Show me.”

Peter made a motion to pull his hand away. Chasten gently, firmly pulled it back.

“I need my hand to play,” he protested.

“I can follow. I’ll - ” Chasten brushed his thumb around from the palm so his hand was just hovering, covering Peter’s. “I’ll apply less pressure, is all.”

At the motion of skin over skin Peter shivered once, but only once. “What do you want to hear?” he asked.

“Well, definitely not these,” Chasten said, looking at the well-worn Hanon and Czerny etude books marked up on the music stand in front of them. “You mentioned Rhapsody in Blue at dinner.”

“I can’t play Rhapsody in Blue with your hand - ”

Chasten cut him short with a whisper. “Yes, you can. You just take a part. And then you play it. Slowly.”

Peter blinked several times. Nodded. “Um," he said. He stretched out a foot to reach the pedals, clearly running through the score in his mind. "This is from toward the end. I think the left hand will be fairly easy to follow here,” and he began to play a series of rising, restless, repeating chords that yearned to float totally upward but were trapped by the logic of their own chromaticism. When the theme drifted out of the texture, it arrived with ecstatic accompanying bubbles of notes in the right hand. An uneven rhythm methodically began accompanying beneath Chasten’s hand. The passage ended with a harmonic question mark.

The abrupt silence afterward was deafening.

“I’ve forgotten what’s next,” Peter said. He didn't release the pedal. The instrument buzzed. “It’s been a long time.”

“Have you ever played a duet before?”

“Not with anyone I admired.”

Chasten traced his temple and brushed back a hair that had fallen out of place while he’d been playing. “Do you admire me?” he asked.

Peter didn’t answer. It was clear that he couldn’t. Chasten was fascinated by how this man kept becoming so utterly, obviously, shook-to-the-bones undone by the tiniest possible gestures. It felt like he was driving a very expensive car through a narrow-streeted neighborhood. He leaned in a bit and made his voice very soft. “If you’d show me the rest of the house… I’d admire you.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Peter finally said.

“You say yes.”

He didn’t say yes, but he did move to stand up, and he was squeezing Chasten’s hand with a new intensity. Chasten was confused, but game. “There’s a balcony upstairs,” he offered. “It has river views. I go there when I need to think.”

Chasten concealed the flicker of his disappointment with a sympathetic smile and followed him through the ghostly old house. At the foot of the stairs, as they were rounding the newel post, Peter seemed to hesitate for just a fraction of a second, making Chasten wonder if he was about to stop dead in his tracks and call the whole evening off. But just as quickly the sensation passed, and Chasten realized he must have been imagining things, because now Peter was practically pulling him up the steps. They reached the top of the staircase and a long airy moonlit hallway. There was no balcony in sight.

“Where - ” Chasten asked, but suddenly Peter’s shadow was turning a silver doorknob and then pushing at his shoulders. He was knocked off-balance and he stumbled backward into a new room, barely avoiding crashing into the bedside lamp, glowing serene and yellow.

He felt a mattress at the back of his knees. He sank down to sit on it, and blinked a few times.

Peter’s face had somehow turned both ashen and blushy. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I let go.”

“Then come back,” Chasten said.

He extended his hand into the space between them.

Peter hesitated, but finally gripped it again. It took all the strength he had, but Chasten pulled him closer until he was standing directly in front of him, and they were finally just an inch apart. He smelled like nervous sweat and faded, tasteful, mild-mannered cologne. Chasten waited, just sitting there, curious what concentrated motionless proximity might do. After a few minutes, as if on cue, he felt movement, and then a careful, timid hand in his hair.

“Your hair is so short,” Peter said, taking a few strands between his fingers.

“What?”

“I mean, compared…” He tensed, flustered. “I dated a few women in college.”

“Oh. Right.”

“You can make a joke. I know it’s absurd.”

Chasten paused. Finally, in response, he took off his glasses and set them next to the lamp and the pathetically endearing bedside book of love poetry. He took Peter’s hand, still in his, and looked up, as steadily as he knew how, and drew the back of Peter's hand across his own face. He’d shaved long enough ago that he hoped his cheek wasn’t completely smooth.

“Your _eyes_,” Peter breathed.

Without breaking eye contact, he gently set the fingertips of his free hand, one by one, on Peter’s hip. Peter’s sudden halting of breath was the most satisfying absence of sound he’d ever experienced.

“I - ”

“Shhh. I know.” He took the now-shaky hand that he’d been holding since the foyer and rested it on his collarbone. “Here. My shirt. Unbutton.”

“I can’t - ”

“Yes, you can.” Chasten steadied the fingers trembling at his throat until they were able to work the button. It turned out to be all the guidance necessary. “Turn around,” he said, standing. They shuffled in an awkward half-circle. He pressed on Peter’s shoulders until he got the message to sit, at which point his knees seemed to give out. Chasten knelt.

“Why are you like this?” Peter breathed.

“Because I’m gay. Sorry if I forgot to mention that.”

“No, I meant…” It took him a moment to formulate words. “We talked...at dinner…”

“Yes?”

“God, please - please stop. Don’t stop. Please stop.” Then, in a rush: “You said your heart was broken.”

“I said_ I_ was broken.” A pause. “Don’t talk about that now.”

“Then why…?”

“What?”

“Why do you have the bravery to do this with me? You’re a bank that’s just been robbed and you’re leaving the safe unlocked.”

“I don’t do metaphors while half-dressed.”

“I mean, how do you know I’m not going to hurt you?”

Chasten sat back on his heels, but his hands kept wandering. “I guess I don’t. But I like you. When you like someone, it’s just human to show it.”

“This much?”

“I can stop.”

“You don’t need to - I mean - you don’t need to - you don’t need to give me anything. _Shit_.”

Chasten stopped.

“You don’t need to give me anything.” The words burst out of him. “You don’t have to _do_ anything. Which is not to say I’m not enjoying this. I’m enjoying this very much. But...you’re enough. You’re funny. You’re obviously empathetic. On a shallow note, you have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen in a human being’s face. I just want you to know, that’s enough for me. That’s more than I’ve ever had before. That’s what I needed to say. You can carry on. Or don’t. Fuck if I know. I can’t breathe. I’m sorry.”

Chasten rose and sat down on the bed beside him. “Nobody has ever told me that,” he said after a long while had passed.

Peter laid on the sheets, weak. “I had to. I’m too old to lie.”

Chasten looked down and back at him. “Why hasn’t anyone ever told me that?”

Peter shrugged helplessly in reply.

Lost in thought, Chasten laid down himself, carefully, and on his side. He started with a chaste, honest thank-you kiss, but, to his surprise, Peter quickly, hungrily demanded something more. He couldn’t help but laugh at this new out-of-nowhere insistence, and the reverberation of his voice against Peter’s lips only made

* * *

His concentration was broken by his phone ringing. He answered. “Peter?”

“Hey, sorry I’m so late getting back. It’s just there were some donor calls, and then some interviews ran long, and then Mike - ”

Chasten cut him off. “It’s okay. You don’t need to explain.”

“What are you up to tonight?”

Chasten looked at the laptop on his lap and scrolled up through what he’d spent the last two hours writing.

_ Metaphors while half-dressed. Pathetically endearing bedside book. Shook-to-the-bones undone. _

“Long story,” he finally said.

“Oh. Okay.” Awkward quiet. Pete tried again. “Where are you?”

Chasten looked up at the windows for a clue, but then he remembered he’d closed the hotel curtains hours ago, after the sun had set. He hesitated. “Is it crazy I don’t remember?”

Pete hesitated, too. “No."

“I could roll over and try looking at the room phone. There’s probably an address on it.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Thank you.”

“What was your schedule like today?”

“I went to a homeless shelter this morning. I’m too tired now to sound moved by it, but I was. And this afternoon - you know that Lis flew in to...wherever it is I am, right?”

His voice suddenly became aloof. “Nobody mentioned that.”

“Sorry. It was last-minute, so maybe wires got crossed. But she and I decided we wanted to hammer out debate strategy in person.” He glanced at the notebook next to him, filled with scribbled diagrams and color-coded plays that looked like they could belong to a football coach. “We’re stepping it up, by the way. You’d better, too. It’s time to draw some blood.”

“What are you masterminding this time?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but caught himself. “Can we talk about something else today besides the campaign?” he asked. “Just for two minutes?”

Pete sighed. “To be honest, I can’t think of two minutes today that weren’t about the campaign.”

The silence between them was dejected and deflated.

A hard knock interrupted their non-existent conversation.  “Just a sec, someone’s here,” Chasten said, sliding off the bed.

“Be careful.”

He squinted through the keyhole. Just outside was a silky black bob texting maniacally. “Oh, I'll be careful; it’s Lis,” he said, yanking open the chain and pulling the heavy door open.

Pete’s voice had grown distracted, too. “And now I’m getting some texts from Mike. What the…”

Lis strode in, not looking up once from the phone in her hand. This crisscross mishmash of communications had become absurd. “I can let you go,” he said. He realized his voice was flat.

“Sorry, this is important. Policy launch scramble. We’ll touch base again sometime tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure.” Pete didn’t answer. He could practically hear his distraction. “I love you, Peter,” he said impulsively. He barked out the words. “I love you very, very much.”

“Yeah, I love you, too.”

“I - ” Chasten said, but the line had gone dead. He looked at the phone, at his husband’s name, but after a few seconds the screen went black and blank, and even that disappeared, too.

“Are you done for the night?” Lis asked.

He sighed and tossed his phone into his open suitcase. “Done enough. Your laptop’s over there.”

She looked at the nest he’d made, wrappers from hotel vending machine chocolates strewn across the sheets, empty wine glass on the bedside table, half-finished dinner next to the silver room service tray. She shook her head. “How can you be this brilliant at campaigning in public and this _pathetic_ at it in private?”

“Because one of us has a heart, and it's not you."

She kicked off her heels and sat down on the bed, carefully winding up the laptop cord and reading what he’d written. “You’re still being disciplined about him, right?”

He leaned against the dresser. “I’ve been reduced to writing porny fanfiction between me and my husband on his senior advisor’s laptop so that it can’t be traced back to me. I’d call that pretty damned disciplined.”

“No dirty texts.”

“No.”

“No dirty emails.”

“No.”

“No dirty phone calls.”

‘No. I’ve even stopped my daily dick-pic-by-carrier-pigeon. Jesus, Lis. There’s been nothing.”

“You cannot cave on this. When we’re hacked - and every campaign this cycle will be - we will not be played for fools. I can’t believe I’m letting you do this much, frankly.”

“Please. Absolutely nobody would be surprised to learn that Lis Smith secretly writes raunchy fanfic to get pervs emotionally invested in her campaign. I'd be boosting your brand.”

She smiled as she read. “Did I ever tell you I wrote Clinton fanfic back in the day? Bill, not Hillary. It was considerably more explicit than this.”

Chasten went for the minibar. “I need another drink,” he said, and he took out another bottle of beer.

“Oooh, this is first date fic, isn’t it? The pervs _love_ first date fic.” As she read, she reached out her hand. Chasten understood this was an ask for alcohol. He took out another bottle, opened it for her, and handed it over. “If this is actually what went down on your first date - ha, _went down_ \- it would explain so very much.”

“Well, wouldn’t you like to know.”

She took a swig. “What happens next? Sex or plot?”

“Liz Warren and a Marine are about to climb the drainpipe.”

“She's gonna need to whip that Marine _hard_ after the next debate.”

“Cheers to that,” he said, and they toasted.

“Well, as energizing and indeed arousing as that fuck-up of an orgy sounds, it’s getting late and I need some sleep. You want me to finish this fic for you? I could probably post it by tomorrow. Sans Marine.”

“Why not. Take my story. Finish it for me. Let art reflect life.”

“Fuck your dramatics. I’ll leave it. Remind me it’s on here when we meet up next.”

She picked up her strappy shoes, dangling them from a single finger, and held the laptop on her slender hip like it was a baby. Chasten was surprised at the regret he felt watching it leave the room.

“He and I can’t keep going like this,” he said as she opened the door to leave. “Something’s going to give.”

“You’ll be able to fuck in the White House.”

“We had a white house.”

“Well, I’ve got good news: if you can’t pull your shit together, you’ll be headed back there. Good work this afternoon, Chasten. Go to bed.”

When the door lurched closed, he was completely alone.

* * *

_Good clean fun. - _[Pete Buttigieg, Instagram, August 28, 2015](https://www.instagram.com/p/68um0FLFKe/)

_"Good clean fun."_ \- [Chasten Glezman, Instagram, August 28, 2015](https://www.instagram.com/p/68ub1Cgnkn/)


	9. December 11, 2010: Eau Claire, Wisconsin

The Chippewa River was a cold gray gash cut through the topography of the university campus. On the south bank sat the picturesque quad, its dignified geometry softened by curving sidewalks and a tiny tinkling creek. On the north bank, across a narrow pedestrian bridge, the fine arts building anchored a street of dimly-lit dives and college bars.

He’d gotten a phone call from a beloved professor early in the day, and it had left him reeling. The morning had been spent in denial and the afternoon in tears. It took him hours to look out the window and realize it was snowing. Eyes raw, he watched the local news, weathermen warning viewers that it was dangerous to go outside. He began to feel a sense of calm - of certainty, even. At nine o’ clock exactly, he left his apartment, locked the door behind him, and set out into the muffled void of a world, blanketed by and spinning still with snowflakes.

Chasten was counting on two things: that he was venturing into a blinding blizzard of historic proportions alone, and that his reckless boyfriend hadn’t yet gotten over the novelty of being twenty-one.

The route to intercept him was difficult. He felt like he was trudging through the white sand of a new desert. Over a foot and a half of snow had already fallen, more was coming, and the effort of continual path-breaking proved to be more exhausting than he’d anticipated. But finally he reached the campus bridge and stopped to catch his breath beneath the unnaturally orange glow of a streetlight. As time passed, the footprints he’d left behind drowned, sunk under the fresh snow that was gradually drifting up to his knees.

When Chasten finally saw him coming - lurching - down the sidewalk, he felt a sudden wave of disgust. He wondered if the freeze had somehow reached his heart.

His boyfriend was oblivious to his presence until he staggered straight into him. “Chas?" and Chasten hated that the nickname made his heart flip. "What are you doing here?” His beery breath was visible in the cold.

“I knew you’d be here,” Chasten said simply. “I didn’t want you going back to your dorm alone.”

A hesitation. “...Thanks.”

Chasten reached out his arm. “Can you walk okay?” he asked, although it was patently obvious he could not.

“I can now,” his boyfriend said, and he proceeded not just to lean on Chasten’s shoulder but to practically pull it out of joint.

“Careful,” Chasten murmured, and they spent an unsteady moment rearranging their weight until they could somehow half-shuffle, half-stumble forward together.

Even in his boots and thick socks Chasten’s feet were starting to burn with the seep of the wet cold. He focused on the lights in the dorm across the river, doing his best to ignore the intense discomfort of the flakes falling and melting and stinging on his face.

“Your black eye,” his boyfriend said, once they had made it halfway across the bridge, where the wind whistling across the water had turned into an unceasing, inhuman cry.

“What about it,” Chasten said. His voice was dull.

“It’s looking better.”

He cast a rueful sideways glance. “We’re in a blizzard, I’m wearing foundation, and you’re drunk.”

These three facts were three too many for his boyfriend to comprehend. “Oh.”

A student buried in a maroon parka stumbled past them, scarf and hat and hood wrapped so tightly around her head that she clearly had no peripheral vision. Chasten looked at her, then looked over his shoulder. Once she passed, the bridge would be deserted.

“If you’ll recall,” his boyfriend said, as if about to embark on a sudden slurred soliloquy, “you’re the one who didn’t accept my apology.”

Chasten didn’t know how to reply to that. He eventually opted for a stark statement of fact. “I’m here.”

Suddenly his boyfriend turned and Chasten was closing snowy eyelashes and feeling warmth on his lips. His boyfriend tasted of fried cheese curds and cheap beer...but there was something else, too, an achingly familiar scent that clung to his coat, triggering memories and cravings and lust, and his body leaned into it without permission. Barely able to think, Chasten took charge and kissed, stumbling forward, pushing, until his boyfriend was backed up against the icy railing.

His boyfriend had begun to pull, paw at Chasten’s tightly knotted scarf, to no avail. “Come back to my dorm,” his boyfriend whispered. “‘It’s too cold to love you here. Come with me where it’s warm.”

Chasten struggled. They were below a light now, and the spinning swirl of snowflakes in the gale, combined with the warmth and adrenaline and sheer desperation of the kiss, was dizzying. But finally, deep within himself, he found an iota of self-discipline. “No,” he finally said. “I can't.” He wanted so badly to sound firm, but his voice cracked.

“Why not?”

“Because…” Without thinking he took a deep breath; his lungs turned to ice, and he flinched with pain. “Because we’re done.”

“What?”

“You and I…” He did his best to enunciate. “Are done.”

Confusion clouded his boyfriend’s face. Chasten didn’t know what to do with his sudden pity. “Then why’d you meet me?”

“I needed to fight back.”

Even drunk, his boyfriend was surprised. “That isn’t like you.”

“It is now,” Chasten said, and before he could change his mind, he made a sudden movement, hoisting his boyfriend up by the knees so that he was sitting atop the slippery bridge’s high railing.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Stop struggling,” Chasten said, holding tight to his coat. He realized his voice had taken on a soothing quality. “You’re drunk. You’ll fall.”

“Let me down!”

Those three words provided just the injection of revulsion he needed to keep going. “Let you down? Like you let me down? Because I can’t do that. And you want to know why? Because I have some actual goddamn fucking _loyalty_, that’s why.”

His boyfriend was starting to hyperventilate, the endless expanse of wind and snow and black night pressing at his back. He leaned forward onto Chasten’s shoulders and clung to them. Suddenly everything smelled of hot sweat and alcohol. Their noses nearly touched.

“Professor Chapman told me,” Chasten whispered.

“Professor Chapman is a bitch.”

“Professor Chapman would vouch for me in a murder trial,” and he leaned forward toward the rail just barely, until his boyfriend screamed in terror at the shift in his center of gravity.

“For fuck’s sake, Chas, I was just - ”

“No,” Chasten said, pressing a snow-coated glove onto his boyfriend’s lips. “No more stories. She saw what she saw.”

“We were just fooling around; it didn’t mean - ”

“Do you know what bothers me the most?” Chasten demanded, ignoring him. “You could have cheated behind closed doors. You could have humiliated me in private. But no. You had to go betraying me on a fucking stage. With other people watching.”

Bitter, terrified laughter. “Oh, so you care where I did it?”

“The only place I feel halfway happy, halfway human, is on that stage. Now it’s just going to be the place where my dumbass wannabe-actor ex decided on a whim after a rehearsal that I wasn’t good enough for him.”

“You’re more fucked up than I thought.”

“Yes!” Chasten said. He was shouting. “I am!”

They stared at each other. His boyfriend gripped Chasten’s coat a little less tightly, a little more willing now to brave falling backward into the frozen river than forward into his frozen arms. “So what now?” he asked. “You’re gonna kill me?"

Chasten realized he was breathing too fast, thinking too fast. He took a moment to reassess. “I - I don’t think so,” he said. “I just needed to see if I could.”

“Could you?”

Chasten knew the answer, and he tried to say it out loud, but he couldn’t bring himself to. “If I ever throw my future away for someone,” he finally said, “I want it to mean something.”

He let the words hang in the air, as if he was going to add to them. But no more words came. So finally, carefully, he helped his boyfriend off the railing and back onto the bridge.

Between the relief and the beer and the sheer force of the wind, his boyfriend’s knees collapsed, and then his upper body began a familiar spasm. Chasten knelt wearily and tilted his companion's heaving face away so the vomit didn’t get on their coats. Once there was nothing left to choke out but bile, Chasten unwrapped his own scarf and used it to wipe his boyfriend’s lips and chin clean. He wondered if he was crying. It felt too cold to know, but his bruised eye was beginning to ache.

They sat there together on the blanket of snow until his boyfriend - his ex, he thought to himself for the first time, and his stomach dropped at the idea of yet another ex - was ready to be helped up. “Then I guess this is goodbye,” his ex said, after Chasten had pulled him to his feet.

“No,” Chasten said, “this is,” and he took off a glove and punched him in the same eye that he’d been punched in. He screamed, but Chasten could tell it was more from shock than pain.

What had to be done had been done. He turned around and began trudging back across the bridge by himself, feeling the burn of the wind on the back of his now-bare neck. His vision went blurry; his glasses were fogging up, and his tears felt like they were freezing on his lashes.

“You fucking drama queen _asshole_!” he heard from behind as he walked away. “You’ll never do any better than me!”

The wind and the snow made voices quieter than they otherwise would be.

“I know!” Chasten screamed to the darkness over his shoulder, and he kept walking, and he didn’t hear anymore.

* * *

October 10, 2019

Los Angeles, California

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Lis asked.

Pete hesitated. “I trust you.”

Pete and Lis were alone in a too-bright backstage room at yet another campaign event, this one a town hall on LGBTQ issues co-presented by CNN and the Human Rights Campaign. Biden’s half-hour had just begun, and Pete was scheduled to take the stage immediately afterward. Lis had asked to clear the room so they could run through the night’s talking points uninterrupted. As soon as the staff had filed out, and an exhausted Chasten had left in search of coffee, their conversation began. They didn't run through talking points.

“No.” Lis set down her phone for emphasis. “That’s not how this is gonna work. Tell me you want to do this. And mean it. If you don’t commit, you could sink the whole campaign.”

Pete sighed. He took a moment to recalibrate, then answered again. “I want to do this,” he said, and his voice was confident.

Lis was convinced. “Good,” she said, and she sent a text.

While they waited, they watched Biden on the TV. Lis muttered under her breath at every other sentence; Pete flashed a series of half-smiles at every expression of displeasure. “Jesus motherfucking Christ,” she finally said. “If I ever get tired of you not following my directions, cue up video of this guy to shut me up. Fucking hell.”

A few minutes later, there was an authoritative knock on the door. They stood. Pete strode over to open it, wiping the sweat off his hand before he did.

“Senator Klobuchar,” he said, voice warm.

“Mayor Buttigieg.” She nodded and stepped into the room, a handful of staffers behind her. All eyed him warily over their phones, but they left their boss alone and hung back in the bustling hallway.

“Can I offer you a drink?” Pete asked as he closed the door. “For some reason we have a fully stocked mini-fridge in here.”

“CNN thought it was in bad taste to skimp on the gay one tonight,” Lis said, shaking the senator’s hand.

Klobuchar cracked a smile. “A bottle of water would be nice.”

Pete bent down to retrieve two and extended one to Klobuchar. “It’s always great to see another Midwesterner on the trail, Senator.”

“Absolutely; there are too few of us this cycle, considering. Congratulations on running such a fine campaign.”

“Well, we’re lucky to have a great team. You know, they’re sending Chasten out to your neck of the woods this week. Minneapolis and Eau Claire. He graduated from UWEC. Says that makes him an honorary Minnesotan. I'll leave that to you to decide.”

“Heresy. But he’s so charming, I’ll let it slide. You must be so proud of the work he’s been doing.”

“I married up, that's for sure.” Then, with a sudden anxiety for his guest’s comfort: “Please, sit.”

All three gingerly took a seat on different couches. For a moment no one spoke. The only voice was Biden’s; he was telling a story about two well-dressed men he’d seen kissing each other in 1963. The trio studiously ignored him.

“So,” Klobuchar said. “Is all the fake Midwestern nice out of our systems?”

Pete took a drink. “You think it’s fake?”

“Oh, I _know_ it’s fake,” she said. “Let’s ditch the masks. You only have a few minutes, and I’m looking for the brass tacks.”

“Lis is our resident brass tacks specialist.”

Lis leaned forward. “If you want brass tacks, forgive me for skipping a preamble. Your campaign’s in trouble. Judging by the numbers we’re seeing in public and internal polling... If current trends hold, you may not qualify for the November debate. You almost certainly won’t qualify for the December one. And finances are obviously a concern for your campaign. Would you agree that those are fair assessments?”

Klobuchar maintained a frozen, resigned smile. “You wouldn’t be incorrect.”

“The debate on the 15th could prove pivotal for both you and Pete.”

“Yes.”

Pete set down his water. “To that point,” he said, carefully, “our campaign is interested in extending a gentleman’s - and gentlewoman’s - agreement.”

Klobuchar took a moment to absorb this information. “I’m listening,” she said.

“The heart of our strategy this time around,” Lis said, “is to start making a play for Vice President Biden’s voters, and to stress-test Senator Warren’s position on healthcare.”

“And,” Pete said, “we want to know if you’d join us.”

“Join you?”

“Lis is in charge of my debate prep. We’re proposing sharing the broad strokes of what we have with you. Trying to stay on the same page. Deliberately focusing on the same targets. Avoiding each other’s weaknesses. That kind of thing.”

Lis jumped in. “What he’s trying to say is, we want you to Batman and Robin the shit out of it. Tag-team the attacks; tag-team the response to the attacks. Remember Delaney and his middle-aged white guy sidekick, whoever the fuck that was? Do what they _tried_ to do to Warren in July, but be competent and actually give a shit.”

Klobuchar looked back and forth between Lis and Pete. “Interesting,” she finally said. There was a tinge of amused acid to her voice. “I thought you were all about staying above the fray.”

Pete stiffened imperceptibly. Lis noticed and answered for him. “Occasionally I push Pete out of his comfort zone.”

Klobuchar laughed and took a drink. “Warren’s a buzzsaw,” she said. “If you’re not careful, you’ll get pushed right into a spinning blade.”

Pete bristled. “Senator Warren is obviously a formidable candidate. But she has real vulnerabilities, too. We can’t let them go unacknowledged. And I say that not just because Senator Warren is a competitor - ”

“God,” Klobuchar said, rolling her eyes, “don’t use campaign euphemisms with me.”

Pete ignored her. “I say that _not just because Senator Warren is a competitor_,” he repeated, “but because we all need to be challenged. We don’t think she’ll emerge as the nominee. But if she does, she needs to be as strong as possible for the general.”

“You’re adorable,” she said. Pete bit his lip and blinked a few times, but succeeded in saying nothing. “So you want credibility and backup. What’s in it for me?”

“I’d loop you and your staff in on our debate prep. As much as is ethically appropriate, of course. I think you’ll be impressed by its thoroughness.”

“I have my own staff. Why should I use yours? And don’t make a salad comb joke; it’s too easy.”

Pete and Lis exchanged glances. “Pete has...an offer,” Lis said.

“Which is - ?” Klobuchar turned her full attention to Pete.

“Look,” he said. “We’re gaining real momentum in Iowa and New Hampshire. Our internal polls prove it. Now, make no mistake. Beating Trump is our first priority, and we’d need to make sure that the final ticket can do that. So I’m not going so far as to offer you VP. But. I can promise that if we help each other in these debates and I win the nomination, you’d be toward the top of my shortlist.”

Klobuchar barked a laugh. “Right under Abrams, Gillum, Harris, Booker, and half a dozen other black politicians, right?”

Pete flinched. Lis’s voice was quiet. “Maybe.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Pete said. “If a partnership works well for us on the 15th, we could have conversations about continuing it. And getting you whatever it is that you want. Maybe it’s not VP. I don’t know. But those are conversations I’m open to having. Given cooperation.”

“What brought this on?” she asked. “What dirt did you find to keep me in line?”

“There’s no dirt, Senator,” Pete said. Lis shifted in her seat and glanced down at her phone. “It’s just that we view the next debate as very important, you’re an excellent debater, and our messages align in important ways. We think we could break out together.”

“You're too goddamn wholesome for your own good.”

“Well, we try.” He caught himself. “I try. Lis isn’t much help on the wholesomeness front.”

“Fuck off,” Lis said affectionately.

Klobuchar smiled at the banter. “You know,” she said, with the wistful voice of a woman imagining what might have been, “whoever pulled the trigger on hiring you, Ms. Smith, made the best decision of this entire cycle.”

The door opened and Chasten stepped in, carrying two coffees. His eyes widened when he saw Klobuchar on the couch. “Senator!" he exclaimed, delightedly emphasizing each syllable. "I didn’t know you were stopping by; what a treat.” He handed a coffee to Pete and shook her hand. His fingers radiated heat. “I always love seeing you two together. I think of you as the bridge candidates. Uniting the party. Would you like a coffee? If you like pumpkin spice, you can take mine.”

Klobuchar smiled. “When I win, I’m appointing you First Gentleman.”

Chasten’s expression turned grave. “I’m afraid I can’t settle for less than Secretary of State.”

There was another knock at the door. “Ten minute warning for the mayor,” a coordinator shouted.

They all stood. “Well,” Klobuchar said. “For whatever reason, my initial impression is to accept. But I’ll talk to my staff first. Throw a binder in their eye if they tell me not to.”

Chasten’s smile faded.

Klobuchar winked. “That was what's known in the business as a joke.”

Pete laughed and stepped forward to shake her hand. “Thank you for your time, Senator. It’s deeply appreciated.”

“As is yours. I’ll be in touch with Lis. Good luck tonight.”

“You, too.”

Once she'd left, Pete left the door cracked for a moment and looked back at Lis and Chasten. As if on cue, they heard her start to argue with an aide as they walked down the hallway. Chasten shot him a disapproving glare and closed the door.

Too much had happened to debrief in any useful way before Pete was due onstage, and they all knew it. So they just sat back down again to watch the final few moments of Biden’s appearance, Lis on one couch, Pete and Chasten on another.

“Fucking _ bathhouses _?” Lis screamed at the screen.

Chasten glanced at Pete. He seemed restless. Uncertain. To comfort him, Chasten began tracing the shapes of letters in loopy cursive on the back of his husband’s shirt: _ I - l-o-v-e _… Pete didn’t look at him, but he did just barely arch his back into Chasten’s fingertip, a wordless, appreciative acknowledgement.

Chasten remembered the earnest words from Pete's airport proposal. "_Sometimes privacy for us will be stealing away a quiet moment even with people all around us_." They'd both been young and naive with no clue what those words would actually mean, but in the moment they'd felt so desperately, irresistibly romantic.

“It’s a shame she can’t align her public and private personas,” Pete finally said. His regret was genuine. “She should have been able to do what we did.”

“Unfortunately for Democratic politics,” Chasten said, still tracing letters, “I can only marry and message one candidate at a time.”

..._ Y-o-u _, he wrote.

A hint of a blush passed over Pete’s face.

Chasten paused before idly beginning to write a new phrase. “Do you think she’ll follow through?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Well, she’d better behave. If she betrays you, she has another thing coming.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Pete said absentmindedly.

Chasten smiled ruefully to himself at that. He leaned over. “Before I forget, Lis,” he said, “a staffer wanted me to pass this on.” With his free hand, he reached down into his messenger bag and withdrew a folder labeled A.K. Staffer Interview Transcript. He passed it behind his husband’s back. Pete was too distracted by Biden and the sweet soft cursive to notice.

Lis opened the folder and paged through it. Her eyes widened. She typed a text. Chasten’s phone vibrated.

_ Video w/this?? _

He typed two messages, one-handed.

_ Our staffer says her staffer says yes _

_ “Devastating & disqualifying” _

Pete suddenly leaned back. Chasten discreetly set his phone face-down on the couch cushion and looked meaningfully at Lis, who gave a single nod: permission for him to forget her for a few minutes and to focus on his husband. He brushed off his shoulders with a quick light touch and smoothed his tie against his chest, lingering just barely in the places that he knew would, if touched in succession, stop Pete's breath.

"Fuck you," Pete said, too quietly for even Lis to hear.

"Afterwards, dear."

“Five minute warning for the mayor,” called a voice outside the door.

“Good luck, babe,” Chasten said, kissing his husband’s cheek. “Smile at me when you’re up there. Did you make out what I wrote on you?”

Pete smiled. “Not quite.”

Chasten smiled, too. “_ You’ll kill it _,” he said.

* * *

_“A place that shapes you never leaves you. So good to be back in Eau Claire today.”_ \- [Chasten Buttigieg, Instagram, October 16, 2019](https://www.instagram.com/p/B3sQOxtB73R/)


	10. October 28, 2019: South Bend, Indiana

Over the course of their marriage, their dates had evolved into public events that, even for them, strained the definition of the word "date." This particular one had included a media scrum on South Bend leaf removal and a stint spent handing out Halloween candy at a baseball stadium. Again and again out of the corner of his eye Chasten saw his husband’s gentle hand reach out. He heard his genuine shoulder-shaking chuckle when something amused him, and his polite and patient laugh when something did not; he felt a secret pride that he knew the difference. Every time that Chasten crouched down to look a little boy or little girl level in the eyes, he felt Pete’s curious gaze on his back. He felt like he was being forced to audition for fatherhood all over again, and that irrational thought irritated him. Haunted him.

Ultimately, though, he found himself lost in the kids’ worlds of imagination and the impossible. “It’s so wonderful to pretend,” he said conspiratorially to one quiet little girl dressed as a unicorn, and despite her initial hesitancy toward him, she broke out into a grin, charmed utterly. It took a moment to realize what he’d said, and his smile faded before hers.

* * *

Late that night Pete was wearily opening their bedroom door when Chasten realized he couldn’t take it anymore. With no warning whatsoever, he pushed Pete inside and up against the wall, lips wandering over his fine-featured face, kissing every inch of it with a passion and a hunger he hadn’t felt since the day they’d gotten married.

“Do you need something?” Pete managed to ask. He sounded surprised. Chasten counted it as a victory, in this new scripted life, that he was still capable of surprising his husband. It was an even greater victory that he was still capable of surprising himself.

“I need sex,” he said.

“No shit. What brought this on?”

“Do me a favor and shut your brain off for two minutes.”

He pushed Pete to the bed and sat and tried to pull him down onto the blankets. Pete was agreeing, just not on Chasten’s extravagant, unbridled terms. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it my way,” he said.

“Your way takes too long,” Chasten said. "I need instant gratification."

Pete smiled. “But my way’s so much better.”

An involuntary tremble in Chasten’s hand reminded him that Pete was right. He sighed, then nodded.

“So," Pete said. "Close your eyes."

Chasten closed his eyes. He could smell cologne, hear the rustle of a dress shirt, see the blue-gray dark from behind his lids after Pete’s wiry arm had turned off the yellow bedside lamp. He felt his glasses being taken off, carefully. He heard the clicks as the glasses were folded and then placed on the book of poetry that Pete kept on the bedside table. (How, he wondered, could a man who loved both him and poetry be real?) Pete was motionless for a moment, and Chasten’s palms began to sweat. Nothing happened. But then, slowly, weight shifted. The mattress creaked. Kind hands touched, then held his face. Two thumbs brushed against his cheekbones. And then came the lightest possible kiss, on top of each of his closed eyes, one after the other. At the gentle love of the gesture, Chasten made a sound he’d never made before. Somewhere in the haze of sensations, he noticed it sounded terribly, terribly sad. Pete stopped, as if taken aback. Chasten didn’t dare open his eyes again. A few moments later, he felt lips trace tentatively along his jawline, and then down his throat to his collar, damp now with sweat.

“Chasten,” his husband whispered into his neck. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want a child,” Chasten said.

The lips on his neck froze, then disappeared altogether. His eyes fluttered open. They weren’t yet used to the dark; he had no way of reading the expression of the shadow in front of him. He felt a sudden surge of panic, but then, just as quickly, relief. Because it was the truth.

“I can’t be alone anymore,” Chasten said.

Pete hesitated. He was confused. “But I’m right here,” he whispered. “I’ll always be here, love.”

Chasten didn’t reply.

“Lie down.” Chasten desperately wanted to protest, to at least try to use words to describe the ache throbbing in his chest, but that voice made him helpless to do anything but obey. Once his head had sunk back into the plush pillow, he felt fingers carefully tending to his hair, making sure it was neat and smooth. Then Pete shifted on the bed, took Chasten’s left hand, and pressed it up against his heartbeat as he kissed him. Chasten ground his wedding ring into his husband’s skin, desperate. But, to his horror, the closer they got, the further away he felt. He tried wiggling his fingers to grab the fabric of Pete’s shirt, as if that would somehow help. Pete made a low humming sound.

Chasten broke off the kiss. “You’re slipping away,” he whispered. “And it’s only going to get worse.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When was the last time we went shopping? Cooked together? Went out for coffee? Did a normal, human thing?” He took a deep shuddering breath of his husband’s scent, wishing his lungs could expand to fill his whole body. “What the fuck were we thinking?”

Pete dropped his hand and sat up. He wasn’t whispering anymore. “What were _ we _thinking?”

Chasten blinked. “Well, it wasn’t just my mistake. You went right along with it.”

“Did I just hear you call this campaign a fucking _mistake_?”

Chasten squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Hurt me if you need to. But don’t stop touching me. Please don’t stop touching me.”

Pete was quiet for a moment. “I don’t need to hurt you,” he finally said in a tone that was half-irritated, half-pitying. He undid Chasten’s belt, motions sullen. Chasten sighed and reached down, taking Pete’s hair into hands and gently pulling him back up his chest so they were face-to-face again.

“I went through so much, Peter,” he said. “I found my soulmate. And then I gave him away first chance I got.”

He kissed him in the same agonized way he remembered kissing him on their wedding night, as if they were saying their last good-bye, and there was a better husband waiting for Peter right outside the door.

“I appreciate the passion,” Pete finally said, “but you’re being dramatic. I’m right here.”

Chasten felt hot salty pinpricks in the corners of his eyes. Pete was straddling him, keeping him from giving up and rolling over to bury his face in the pillow, so he just turned his head and pressed his cheek as deeply into it as he could. He felt fingers unbuttoning his shirt buttons with a frustrated impatience, then lips kissing the just-exposed skin below his ear. Despite himself, Chasten began to squirm.

“I know you want kids,” Pete said in between the kisses and the buttons. “I do, too. But - ”

“You could have fooled me,” Chasten said into the pillow.

Pete stopped, but then kept going. “What has gotten into you? Wanting kids was the emotional centerpiece of my coming out editorial.” His kisses began to stray from below the ear to the exposed nape of Chasten’s neck.

Chasten replied with great difficulty. “Maybe...you just needed...a way...to make fucking a man sound wholesome.”

The kisses stopped. The sudden cool air on the back of his neck was torture. “On our wedding night,” Pete began, but he was interrupted when he finally reached the last and lowest button on Chasten’s shirt. “Here, sit up.” Chasten did, reluctantly. With awkward motions he took off his shirt, then Pete’s hands hovered over his as he took off his undershirt, uselessly guiding him. All of these motions had become routine for them, if a tad rusty. But then Pete did something new: he took the sharp edge of his thumbnail and drew a thin line down Chasten’s neck as he whispered into his ear. “On our wedding night, we made a promise. Do you remember our promise?”

Chasten didn’t understand why he couldn’t answer; all that came out was something akin to a half-sob.

“It sounds like you want a reminder.”

Chasten wasn’t sure he needed a reminder, much less wanted one, but now Pete had affixed his icy gaze on him, and even in the dark he was powerless not to follow that ice to the ends of the earth. Pete started kissing down his neck, dragging the damn thumbnail down the inside of his arm as he did, and the contrast made him half-cry, half-moan. Pete kissed his lips to muffle the sound.

“We promised,” Pete said, “that even if we had to lie to each other outside those doors…”

The fingers of his right hand wrapped beneath Chasten’s, and he lifted Chasten’s wrist up to his lips.

“We would always…”

He moved his lips to Chasten’s collarbone, but refused to forget the wrist, still lightly stroking the veins there with his thumb.

“Be honest…”

A kiss on the breastbone.

“With each other…”

The ribs, rocky now since he’d lost weight. He took special, worried care here.

“In this bed.”

His lips sank down to where the belt had been. “I didn’t come out for the sex,” he breathed. “I came out to fall in love. I came out to find you.”

Several minutes passed where they didn't talk at all.

“So can I be honest?” Pete finally said, sitting up.

Chasten was breathing too heavily to answer.

“I don’t understand the rush. You’re only thirty. When I was your age - ”

“Not this again - ” Chasten moaned.

“ - I still had three years left in the closet. It’s okay. You have time. _We_ have time.”

Chasten caught his breath just enough to respond. “When you were my age,” he panted, “you were a small-town mayor fucking up your city's race relations. Not criss-crossing the country alone and living out of a suitcase to make your husband president.”

Pete’s entire body stiffened at this characterization. But he didn’t push back: it was unkind, maybe, but fair. “That’s what I’m saying,” he finally said. “You’re miles ahead of where I was at thirty. So just...slow the fuck down.”

Chasten closed his eyes again. “But how do I slow the fuck down when everything’s going so fast?”

Pete wistfully traced his lips with his finger. “I don't know. You’ve always been the expert on pacing a story.”

“I want a child,” Chasten said again, stubbornly. Then: “You _owe_ me a child, Peter.” He didn’t know what else to say.

He felt Pete leaning over him. He was being very careful not to hurt him, but he loomed nevertheless. Chasten opened his eyes. They were face-to-face now. He could see that the muscles in Pete’s neck were tense.

“We are talking in circles,” Pete said when he finally spoke. “Let’s stop doing that,” and Chasten realized, afraid, this was the first time Pete had ever used this tone of voice with him. “What exactly do you want me to do? Research adoption agencies during commercial breaks at the debates? Bond with a baby when Donald Trump refuses to leave the White House and precipitates a constitutional crisis? Study child development in my spare time when I’m flying across the world restoring American credibility abroad?”

Every question stung just as surely as a slap to the face. Because he was right. Because he was always right. “You have me and your mother,” Chasten finally said. “We could handle it. We were _going_ to handle it.”

Pete’s eyes flashed. “I’m not going to commit to raising a child until I know I can do it right. So you have a master’s in education. You can direct children in plays. Wonderful. That still doesn’t give you the know-how or the right to raise our daughter by yourself.”

Chasten blinked a few times, hard. A tear streaked down his face anyway. “I gave up my career for you, Peter.”

“And if this campaign falls apart, I gave mine up for you.”

Chasten couldn’t handle his husband’s hot breath on his face anymore. He pushed him aside and rolled over to his side of the bed. “A modern Gift of the Fucking Magi,” he finally said, wiping his face with his hand. “What’s the line? _Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order to buy a gift for the other._”

Pete hesitated. “But there’s more. _Of all who give gifts, these two were the most wise._” Of course, Chasten thought. Of course he’d memorized the quote in its entirety; of course.

Pete reached out, tentatively, to write on Chasten’s back with his fingertip, but Chasten arched just out of reach.

“Please stop touching me,” he whispered.

“Please stop saying terrible things.”

There was such a mournful, defeated quality to Pete’s voice that Chasten softened despite himself. He rolled over onto his back, sighed, and looked at him across their pillows. “I’m saying terrible things because I love you,” he said. “You made me promise to be honest in this bed. Well, I am. I need someone in my life who this job won’t obliterate.”

“Then,” Pete said, “I refuse to be obliterated.”

Chasten took a deep breath. He nodded.

They laid there for awhile studying the sincerity in each other’s faces, eventually accepting the other’s good faith, reluctantly. Finally Chasten pulled Pete’s pillow toward his shoulder and patted it. Pete didn’t need a second invitation.

In two minutes he was asleep, arm instinctively stretched around Chasten’s waist, the rest of the sex forgotten. Chasten realized he needed to wake him up; he’d never taken out his contacts.

But for a long while he didn’t move. He just looked up at the ceiling instead.

* * *

October 28, 2018

Chasten had awoken luxuriously late that morning to diagonal shafts of golden Sunday sunlight pouring through the bedroom windows. The house was still chilly, but he hadn’t even noticed; Truman had curled up on Pete’s side of the bed, and his warm liver-colored muzzle was resting on his knees.

Every Sunday morning that Chasten slept in, Pete would leave a handwritten note with a page number scrawled at the bottom. Chasten reached over to pick up this week’s.

_ I love you _

_ I love you forever _

_ Please remember that _

_ Always _

_ Peter _

Chasten opened the book of poetry with the magic satisfaction of a child opening a birthday present, and turned to the page number that Pete had left under his name. There, underlined in pencil, was an exquisite pearl of a poem by Joyce, somehow both utterly meaningless and endlessly meaningful in its ambiguity and sheer inscrutability:

_ A Flower Given to My Daughter _

_ Frail the white rose and frail are _

_ Her hands that gave _

_ Whose soul is sere and paler _

_ Than time's wan wave. _

_ Rosefrail and fair -- yet frailest _

_ A wonder wild _

_ In gentle eyes thou veilest, _

_ My blueveined child. _

Chasten read it several times, then flipped the note over and wrote a reply.

_ “Gentle eyes” - _

_ I love you & I love you & I love you _

Maybe it wasn't poetic, but it was the truth. Satisfied with that, he stretched, waking up Truman, and slipped out of bed to start making the warmest, most delicious autumn brunch he knew how to.

* * *

At exactly noon, as he was fixing a fruit salad, he heard the front door open, canine barks and whines, dog tags jangling, Pete’s low voice murmuring his greetings. Chasten smiled involuntarily at the coziness of their warm autumn house, and at the irrationally large number of dishes he’d made to share over the course of a long and lazy afternoon.

Pete took off his blazer as he came into the kitchen. “Happy Sunday," he said. "Been hard at work, I see.”

“Oh, just the usual slaving away for you.” Chasten smiled, waiting for his good-morning kiss. There was none. “How was your morning? How was church?”

For a moment, Pete said nothing. He watched Chasten chop the green tufts off the top of strawberries. “Clarifying,” he finally said.

Chasten wasn’t sure what that meant. “That sounds good,” he offered.

“We need to talk.”

“I did it,” Chasten said.

Pete’s eyes widened. “Did what?”

“Yesterday. I brought the corduroy pants to Goodwill. I decided it was better to seek forgiveness than permission. That’s how you know we’re really married.” He flashed a smile. It wasn't returned.

“That’s not…” Pete stopped, then started again. “I don’t care. Donate all my clothes.”

Chasten looked at him with surprise. “You'd let me do that?”

Pete leaned against the counter, and Chasten realized that he hadn’t made eye contact once since coming home. “Look. I love your levity,” he said in the general direction of the cutting board. “I just need...less of it.”

Chasten raised an eyebrow. He started cutting more cautiously. “Okay,” he said, and he waited.

Pete sighed. He was silent.

Chasten said nothing, repressing every single instinct he had to quip to fill the void, to make him smile.

Finally Pete spoke. “Before I left this morning,” he said, “I was digging around in the Target bag for the new tube of toothpaste and I found… I found the kid’s Halloween costume you bought.”

Now Chasten’s eyes fell. His face flushed. He’d forgotten to stuff it deep into the recesses of the closet, where Pete never ventured and where he’d meant for it to stay. “I know it’s too early,” he admitted, cutting deeper into the board than he needed to. “And she’ll probably be too big by next year. But it made it feel real, you know? I needed something real.” He looked at him. “Do you ever need something real?”

Pete turned around and poured himself a cup of coffee. Their tiny kitchen felt impossibly large.

“I know,” Chasten continued. “It’s a waste of money. I won’t do it again. But sometimes I’m impulsive. You know that. That’s part of why you married me, isn’t it? The yin and the yang.”

Pete didn’t turn around. He took a sip.

Chasten stopped cutting. His smile started to fade.

“I...can’t,” Pete said.

Chasten watched his husband’s back. “You can’t...what?”

Pete said nothing.

Chasten said it again, more insistently. He felt a sudden pride that there was only a faint note of alarm in his voice. “You can’t what, Peter?”

Pete finally turned around, looking down to study the steam rising from the dark black coffee. “It’s been a lot,” he said. What he was saying sounded rehearsed, and he was a terrible actor besides. “The wedding, Dad’s diagnosis, Mom’s reaction to the diagnosis, writing a book, planning our campaign, _Lis_, being mayor…”

“Of course.” Chasten hoped his voice sounded more soothing than panicked. He tried to be casual. He started cutting again. “But I mean… To be fair, I did ask you about this. Not too long ago.”

“I know.”

“It’s not like we haven’t had this exact same conversation a dozen times. Two dozen times.”

“Well,” Pete said. He finally looked up, and he turned the full intensity of his gaze on him. Chasten was shocked at how resolute his expression was. “You’d always change my mind, then I’d change it back when I thought about it by myself. Then you’d change my mind again. And then I’d change it back. That whole cycle should have been a red flag. For both of us, not just me.”

Chasten said nothing. He felt a flush of shame, then confusion over the shame, because he’d done nothing wrong - had he? He hesitantly turned around and scraped the tiny pyramid of strawberry stems into the compost. “Lis is going to be furious,” he said, once there was no more fruit to scrape.

“Interesting,” Pete said, mainly to himself, it seemed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I tell you I’m backing out of the adoption you’ve waited your whole life for, and your first concern is for the optics.”

Chasten’s fingers tightened around the knife until they turned white. “If you,” he said, “are in any way implying that I want a child for political purposes…”

Pete put his face in his hands. “Of course I’m not implying that. All I'm saying is…” He sighed. “You’re going to be really, really fucking good during the campaign. And you'd be a really, really fucking good First Gentleman. You’re like Jackie Kennedy not changing clothes after the assassination so the photographers would take pictures of the blood.”

Chasten stared. He didn’t say anything for a long time. “That is a very strange comparison,” he finally managed.

Pete sighed. “God, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Chasten’s emotions began to race. He reined them in, trying to busy his mind with practical things. “Well, if that’s how you feel, I suppose we should...call.” He swallowed. “Call somebody, to let them know you…” He couldn’t finish the sentence, so he started dropping strawberries in with the carefully diced grapes and cantaloupe. He realized that the last thing he wanted to do was eat.

Pete took another sip of coffee. “I already called.”

“What?”

His voice was very quiet. “I knew you’d change my mind, so I called them from work to let them know I had concerns.”

“When?”

“Friday afternoon.”

Chasten bit his tongue until he tasted blood.

“You’ll probably have to call, too. Since we’re married. I’m not clear on what the protocol is. I don’t remember much of the call, honestly.”

Chasten suddenly felt as if he was bartending again, as if the man next to him was a customer who he feigned friendship with for tips. “Is there a reason we didn’t have this conversation on Friday? Or Thursday?” The pitch of his voice went higher. “Or literally any other day in the past three years besides this one?”

Pete hung his head. Chasten found the sight unnerving: his defeated husband, surrounded by the bounty of his too-big autumn brunch, now going completely cold.

When Pete finally looked up, his eyes were glassy with a sheen of tears. “Because you were so happy,” he said.

Chasten froze. He didn’t know what to do with that. He looked down at the colors in the fruit salad. Finally he hesitantly set the salad aside, hoisted himself up to sit on the empty counter next to the stove, and motioned to him. After a moment Pete stiffly gave in to an embrace. He wasn’t crying. He never cried. “It’s okay,” Chasten found himself saying. He realized he was talking to himself as much as Pete. Then, finally, in a delayed reaction, all the right things to say began bubbling out: “It’ll be okay. We have lots of time. You have so much on your plate; I completely understand. I’m just glad you could be honest. It means we’re doing something right.”

Truman ambled in from the other room, concerned, as if he could smell sadness in the air. He nosed at Pete, brown eyes worried. Chasten smiled faintly at that, and he was relieved to see Pete faintly smiling, too.

“I’m not saying you should,” Pete finally said. “But if you go behind my back to get a second dog… I wouldn’t be mad.”

Chasten let loose a single hack of an incredulous laugh before he caught himself. “A dog is not a daughter, Peter.” He regretted it as soon as he said it.

Pete’s voice was quiet. “I know,” he said.

The following Sunday, Chasten woke up to another empty bed, but this time the clouds were low and gray, and Truman had fallen asleep downstairs. There was a new love note on the bedside table, but this time he only skimmed it, and he didn’t even bother looking up the chosen poem. Instead he opened the book, carefully tore out _A Flower Given to My Daughter_, lit the first fire of the season downstairs, and dropped the page into the flame. He watched the carefully underlined words curl into themselves, then melt. As soon as they were gone, he immediately regretted what he’d done. If Pete ever noticed the absence of the page, or the paper ashes in the grate, he said nothing.

* * *

October 28, 2017

Even over Skype, Lis Smith managed to project the energy of an espresso in human form. They’d been working together for nearly a year, but Chasten was still learning how to keep up, filling notebook after notebook with scribbled transcriptions of her rants, raves, and recollections. It was late October and a chill was beginning to descend, so for this particular strategy session, he and Pete were curled up on their living room couch beneath a blanket. Pete leaned on his shoulder, amusedly watching Chasten as he dutifully note-took. Every time Lis said fuck, Pete would silently take the pen, etch a mark at the top of the page, and hand it back to Chasten, who would continue writing without losing a beat. The fuck count for the current conversation was holding steady at eighty-three.

“So in the end, your biography of Midwestern wholesomeness is missing two things,” Lis said as they were wrapping up.

“A governorship and - ?”

Lis made a face. “A wedding and a baby, Pete. Really? A governorship? Are you familiar with the current president’s biography?”

Chasten’s note-taking hesitated. Finally he left two blank bullet points. “Life milestones will occur in due time,” Pete said to Lis, vaguely, as if he was reading from a fortune cookie.

She turned her attention to Chasten. “Chasten,” she ordered. “Can you do anything about your skittish boyfriend?”

He cringed a little and shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I gave him the watch ages ago.”

“Pete, FYI, that whole watch thing only works if you actually get married. Otherwise it’s just a sad backstory to a shitty Ebay listing.”

“Noted,” Pete said dryly.

“So let’s talk about the ideal calendar for this, politically speaking. Wedding next June? You can’t get married much later than that. It’ll look opportunistic.”

“June sixteenth,” Chasten said, pen still hesitating over his notes. “It’s a Saturday, it’s Pride, and it’s the third anniversary of his coming-out editorial.”

Pete stared at him with a renewed amazement. “How do you remember this stuff?”

Chasten shrugged. “Because we’re a team.”

“Okay, but...also a team who is not actually officially engaged yet.”

“June sixteenth, perfect,” Lis said, ignoring him. “Have a few quiet months to yourselves. Adopt a year from now. Then…” Her brain hit a rare mental roadblock. “When do babies start walking?”

Chasten had given up on notes completely and was now just doodling in the margins. “Twelve to fifteen months,” he said absentmindedly.

“See? Perfect timeline. Oh, my God, can you imagine the pictures in the run-up to Iowa? Your combined youth will make Sanders look like he’s about to keel over from a heart attack.”

“Hey Lis, I’ve got a hot PR tip: don’t say that,” Pete said.

She sighed. “It came across stronger than I intended. Look, what I’m saying is, do _this_ particular stuff on _this_ particular schedule, and it’s a perfect calendar for you politically. But here’s the thing: only you two know what the ideal calendar is _personally_. And here’s something I learned myself the hard way: don’t let the political calendar get in the way of the personal one. Never do anything you’re not ready to do. If you’re not on the same page about this kind of shit, not just your campaign, but your entire life together backfires. And that’s when I really start earning my paycheck.”

Pete’s phone started ringing. “It’s the publisher,” he said. “Lis, I’ll let Chasten finish up with you. Thanks so much for dictating the timeline of my life. Keep me updated on when it would be politically advantageous to die.” Chasten started to laugh, but when Pete didn’t join him right away, just for a moment he was spooked, wondering if he’d completely misread him after all. But then suddenly Pete's stony face turned into a soft-eyed smirk and he tucked Chasten beneath the blanket he’d disturbed before picking up the phone. Yet again Chasten relaxed into the fact that all was well between them. Maybe it always would be.

“Thanks for being in my corner,” he said quietly, once Pete was out of the room. He turned the volume on the laptop down and hoisted it onto his lap.

“Just for the record, I’m only half in your corner. From a comms point of view, you’re right, but from a human point of view, you’re fucking insane and you should be institutionalized.”

Chasten added a mark to the paper. “We did fine with the DNC race. If anything, it brought us closer together.”

Lis cackled. “If you’re expecting the DNC race to be in any way, shape, or form comparable to a presidential campaign, you are going to end up incapacitated and drooling in a corner somewhere before a single vote is cast.”

“I’d still be more coherent than the president.”

“I’m fucking serious, Chasten.”

Another mark. “Jackie Kennedy had two babies after the election,” he offered.

“Yeah, and one of them _died_.” He didn’t know how to respond to that. She sighed. “Look, Chasten. Jackie was Jackie Fucking Kennedy. You’re Chasten Fucking Glezman. And to be brutally honest, I’m not sure you’ve snagged your Gay JFK.”

Chasten sank back into the blanket, reveling in its residual warmth. “I have,” he said. In the afternoon light, he could see Pete’s shadow in motion against the wall in the other room. He was selling the memoir he’d pushed him to finish. He had an idea that it could pay for a wedding. “Just… Give him time. He’ll come around.”

* * *

October 28, 2016

Aside from the homemade spaghetti sauce sizzling on the stovetop, the kitchen was silent until Chasten burst in the door, carrying three more Target bags than he’d been asked to bring. He kissed Pete’s cheek and hoisted himself up on the counter next to the stove, looking distinctly buoyant and boyish.

Pete nodded at one of the bags, questioningly. Without a word, Chasten understood and held it open so he could see its contents.

“Huh. Even for grad school, that’s a lot of pencils,” Pete said, turning his attention back to stirring.

“Well, they had an amazing sale, so I thought I’d stock up on school supplies for any future children we choose to have.”

Pete nearly choked. Chasten cackled. “Looks like we’re having lots of children,” Pete finally said.

“Ten, tops. Kiss me.”

Pete kissed him.

“No, actually,” Chasten said, “I got these for the trick or treaters. Pencils _and_ Kit-Kats.”

“May I ask how this grad student is affording so many pencils and Kit-Kats?”

Chasten’s voice lowered. “Don't tell anyone, but I hear he’s sleeping with the mayor.” He took out his wallet and handed over a receipt and a credit card. “They’re living in sin and everything. Huge scandal.”

“Are kids really into pencils?” Pete asked, glancing at the too-long receipt but saying nothing, and tossing it on the pile of unsorted bills on the counter behind him.

“Come on. Pencils from the mayor’s house? Coolest thing ever. You would have absconded with the whole bucket back in the day.” A sudden realization hit him. “Wait. Did you used to trick or treat here? You did, didn’t you? What did you dress up as? Let me guess. You went as Gramsci.”

Pete smiled to himself and let the question pass unanswered. “I’ve never thought of pencils.”

“You’ve never thought about a lot of things. Pencils complement both your nerdy political brand and my quirky teacher brand. They’re perfect.”

Pete shot him a distinctly skeptical, almost disapproving glance. “We don’t have _brands_, Chasten.”

“That’s why we need the pencils. By the way: those pants: not part of your political brand.”

“But they’re corduroy,” Pete said. "Corduroy is a fine brand."

“Pivoting away from the corduroy and toward politics - ”

Pete sighed. “Ugh, let’s not.”

“- what did you think of today’s news?”

“About the Clinton investigation getting re-opened?” Pete said, as if there was any other news.

“That, or I’d be open to discussing Pence’s plane skidding off the runway at LaGuardia last night.”

“Well,” he said, ignoring that. “It’s going to be a giant clusterfuck when she takes office. My guess is that ‘18 is going to be a repeat of 2010. She’ll probably be impeached, even if there’s nothing there, because Republicans are going to Republican. Other than that, who knows?” He sprinkled some Parmesan into the sauce. “All the chaos is going to be murder on whoever runs for our House district.”

Chasten watched the boiling sauce. “You don’t think Comey hurt her chances?”

Pete leaned down, assessing the size and strength of the bubbles. “David Plouffe had a motto during the Obama campaigns,” he said. “No bed-wetting. Just keep your head down and do the work.”

“Well,” Chasten said, watching him lean. “Wouldn’t want to change what worked, I suppose.”

Satisfied, Pete turned down the burner. “You still think she’s going to lose, don’t you?”

Chasten took a Kit-Kat out from the Target bag and unwrapped it. Pete kept waiting for answer. Chasten kept not answering.

“Look at some polls,” Pete finally said. “Put your feet up. I’ve never been less nervous about an election in my life.”

“Well. Let's think of it this way. If she wins, the country wins. If she loses, you and I win, but in 2020. So bottom line, if you don't think about the four years of Trump, we win either way.”

Pete laughed. “You are _insane_. There’s no way she loses at this point, and there’s no way in hell we’re running for president in 2020.” He hesitated. "Aren't you happy as it is?"

"I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life." He blushed a little at how sincere he'd sounded, to Pete's amusement. "So kiss me again,” Chasten said. “To congratulate me on my good fortune. I might taste like chocolate this time.”

This kiss lasted longer than the last one. “You do,” Pete said.

As if to return the favor, Pete took out a bamboo spatula and dipped it in the slowly settling sauce. Chasten eyed it with trepidation, but he took a taste, gingerly.

He immediately burst out laughing.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Before we have to feed those ten kids, please learn how to cook.”

* * *

October 28, 2015

Chasten careened into the coffee shop with all the bright-eyed optimistic energy of the late sunlit Chicago autumn. He apologized to the barista for forgetting to tip at his last visit, took a wad of singles from his coat pocket and stuffed them in the jar on the counter, stood on tiptoe to survey the room, let out a breath of relief when he saw his old high school friend, and maneuvered through the crowd with an authority and sure-footedness only a former waiter and actor could summon.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, _ sorry _, sorry,” he said to his companion as he slid into the booth. “I completely lost track of time.”

“Chasten!" she exclaimed, relief palpable. "I sent like twenty texts! I thought you were dead!"

“I know; I’m sorry,” he said. He tried to wrestle his smile into a more appropriate neutral expression. “I just didn’t have a chance to answer. I've been in Indiana. I was out canvassing for a - for a friend earlier today; traffic on the way back was terrible - ”

Her shoulders dropped in disbelief. “Oh, my God. You’re fucking a politician.”

His brow twitched and he pursed his lips, but the telltale light still shone from his eyes. “I never said anything about a politician.”

“You don’t need to. No Chicagoan canvasses in Indiana during an off-year election unless they’re getting laid.”

He turned coy. “I’ll pass that along to my friend.”

She sighed. “Chasten, I’m happy for you. But just... Slow the fuck down, okay? You’ve made so many shit decisions when it comes to your personal life. It hurts to watch.”

He ignored her and leaned forward, intent on winning her trust, completely convinced of something beautiful and precious and rare, that he understood beyond a shadow of a doubt, and was ready to describe in detail to anyone who would listen.

“Peter,” he said, “is different.”

* * *

_ One of the best nights of the year! - [Chasten Buttigieg, Twitter, October 28, 2019](https://twitter.com/Chas10Buttigieg/status/1188967007619825664) _


	11. November 1, 2019: Des Moines, Iowa

Concrete floors, concrete walls, concrete columns. Tall and temporary black curtains, arranged to guide the churning masses. Fluorescent lights reflecting on the silver underbellies of the industrial vents above. The thrilling, same-everywhere arena scent of sweat, fizzy sodas, and stale popcorn. Manic voices bouncing off hard surfaces, then breaking into shards, echoing: conversations, questions, laughter, shouts. Streams of humanity coursing past and around and beyond each other, every single body hurrying in a different direction, except for the men and women wearing headsets and carrying clipboards, who just stood in place and looked warily official.

Pete was wringing his hands, eyes darting, brow furrowed. Coordinators and Lis were barking orders and last-minute reminders. Mike Schmuhl stood back and watched with an amused, easy-going detachment.

In the end, amidst this strictly controlled chaos, Chasten had time for none of the cinematic one-on-one pep talk he’d always assumed he’d have a chance to give before the biggest speech of his husband’s career. So instead, under the guise of fixing Pete's hair, even though there were no hairs left to be fixed, Chasten brushed warm fingertips across his forehead, willing that brush to impart calm. But Pete’s gaze had turned vacant. He was inside of himself now, and there would be no drawing him out.

At that, Lis tugged at Chasten’s wrist and linked Mike’s arm in hers, and suddenly he was being pulled away. He glanced over his shoulder, feeling like a parent leaving his child at a new school. But Pete didn’t look back at him. He was lost to the world, staring at the floor, silently reciting his lines. Chasten could read every one on his lips.

“What exactly the fuck’s happening on Twitter?” Lis interrupted.

Chasten tore his gaze away and pasted a smile on his expression, acutely aware of every passing face behind, beside, and before him. “Oh, just the usual idiocy,” the pasted smile said.

Lis kept smiling, too. “I’m referring to your idiocy specifically. Ticketgate.”

This word caused Mike to cast a glance of confusion at him. He wasn’t on Twitter: he was an innocent. “Ticketgate?”

Lis answered. The smile never dropped. “Oh, someone tweeted that Chasten was flying first class into Des Moines, then our political boy wonder here tweeted to clarify that he was in coach, and he even threw out a seat number to prove it. Well, plot twist: aforementioned boy wonder didn’t actually sit in that seat, receipts were produced to prove it, and now he looks like a petty lying spoiled fuck. Which he is, obviously, but we don't like to advertise it.”

Mike turned to Chasten, expression earnest. “I have no idea what she just said, but listen to her.”

The lights glared. The buzz of the approaching crowd was growing louder. It sounded as if they were a sand dune away from catching sight of the ocean. Lis’s boots echoed on the concrete, walking ever faster, clacking ever louder. Chasten started half-jogging to keep up. “I can explain what happened - ”

“I don’t care what happened. I just care how it makes you look. And - ” She raised her phone one-handed. Twitter was open; apparently, somehow, she’d been tweeting while walking. “This bullshit makes you look like you’re jetting off to an I Really Don't Care coat fitting. Bottom line, I'm now getting roped into request-for-comments on articles called ‘Chasten Buttigieg Is Involved in Drama About Airplane Seats.’”

“Oh, come on. Nobody would waste their time with nonsense like that.”

"My inbox wants a fucking word."

Chasten almost sighed in exasperation, but then he caught sight of a cluster of campaign workers in Warren gear eyeing him skeptically. He ran the political calculus and reapplied the smile. “I was just - pushing back,” he said.

“It’s never been your job to push back. It’s your job to fucking lay there and take it.”

And with that, they passed through one final black curtain and into the arena itself, and it felt as if the entire world had opened up. Rows and rows of seats, hundreds of them, thousands of them, stacked one behind the other behind the other behind the other, stretching away and up to the ceiling, curved around, and filling now with rowdy rivulets of distant, faceless, nameless people.

His actor heart swelled: this was the grandest sweep of a stage he’d ever seen.

And even grander ones were yet to come.

Lis noticed his sudden awe and squeezed his hand. “Now,” she said, her smile real now. “Forget fighting back. Forever. Go take a seat at your table, and adore and enjoy your husband like a well-behaved First Gentleman should.”

* * *

Lis and Mike hung back to buy drinks to toast the other's work, but Chasten followed her advice. Twirling around every circular table made him feel like an unrehearsed dancer spinning through the set of a movie musical. He passed from delighted face to delighted face, smiling at selfie settings until his cheeks hurt, trying to hear individual voices above the general din, shouting himself so he might be heard, laughing heartily at all the quips that were funny and at all the quips that were not. By the time he found his seat, his heart was pounding and his head was light. He felt as if he had left sprinkled, scattered remnants of himself behind.

Despite the raw fray of his nerves, he did his best to pay attention during the various introductions, applauding enthusiastically, ornamentally. Every time he thought his smile might fade he prodded himself to assume a camera he couldn’t see was watching, and the smile obediently returned, even broader.

At intervals he glanced down to type on the phone balanced on his knees beneath the table.

_ Are you watching the 2007 Obama speech _

Deafening applause for a line he hadn’t quite caught, but which had been shouted loudly and with great passion into the microphone. He joined in while reading the grammatically correct response that appeared impossibly quickly.

_ You forced me to watch it ten times today alone; I’ve gotten the gist. _

More applause; more shouts; more cheers. He looked at the time. Time was moving faster. Everything was moving faster. His fingers texted faster.

_ You can have an Obama breakout moment here _

_ The crowd is crazy _

_ Remember everything we talked about _

_ Remember how he moved _

_ Jog up the stairs _

_ Switch mic from hand to hand for emphasis _

_ Show off the watch _

_ Pacing, stride length, pointing, hand on heart, smile speed _

_ WHEN YOU WAVE REACH ABOVE YOUR HEAD FOR HEIGHT _

_ Stop ignoring me _

_ The window in which to give speech advice has now officially closed. _

_ At least stop picking at your thumbnail _

_ I know you’re doing it _

_ A jagged edge might show if anyone gets a close-up of your hand with the mic _

_ I love you but I’m ignoring you now. _

_ What’s this hullabaloo on Twitter? _

_ Why would you lie about a plane ticket? _

Chasten looked up, dizzy. Tom Perez was stalking back and forth across the stage, galvanized and gesticulating over the primal roar of Trump-induced fear and fury. The room’s energy was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing Chasten had ever felt in his life. Perez screamed until his frenzied voice was hoarse. “We have your back! Every single one of us! Every single candidate running in this primary has your back! And every single candidate would make an excellent president, and that is why I am so excited!”

There were only a few minutes left; he could feel it in the blood rushing from his aching, ringing ears. Minute by minute, he found himself imagining all that he was kept from seeing. Pete was probably being escorted to a coordinator’s side now. Was probably standing behind the final black curtain now. Was probably clasping his hands until the knuckles hurt now. Was almost certainly still picking his thumbnail now.

Chasten kept typing desperately as the cries mounted on every side of him. If the sound of the arena was an ocean, he was drowning in it, and the phone was his lifejacket.

_ Stop the worrying _

_ Double check your tie is straight _

_ Then crush everyone _

His palms had become so sweaty that he nearly dropped his phone to the floor halfway through the messages. His collar suddenly felt too tight, the crisp cuffs at his wrists too starched. He couldn’t breathe.

He realized he was grinning maniacally. He doubted he had ever known a single moment’s unhappiness in his life.

The lights pulsed to dark. Behind him, a tsunami of a chant began to build. A sparking electric thrill began creeping along his neck. Slowly he turned to look over his shoulder. The chant was their name. Their name was the chant.

A collage of photographs suddenly flickered and lit up the long screen: a portrait from Afghanistan, a crowd of signs and supporters from the steak fry, a view out a New Hampshire farmhouse window and out to a red barn.

And one of them together, sitting on their front sidewalk, gingham-clad and innocent-eyed, Truman by their side, cheerfully normalizing in the way only a rescue dog could be. Chasten watched his own silent, smiling, larger-than-life image looming directly over the little table where his husband would, at any moment, stop to pick up the mic.

The introduction to High Hopes started piercing the cheers.

When he finally caught sight of his husband’s neat dark hair, the bounce in his sleek navy shoulders, and the steel glint in those impossible eyes, he saw a man transformed from the introverted wreck he’d left backstage. Somehow, improbably, the spell of the brush of his fingers - the gentlest touch - had worked.

Chasten had never witnessed a reception so raucous that the pre-chorus of High Hopes had had a chance to kick in. They’d settled on an instrumental version for the dinner, but he could hear the lyrics in his head as clearly as if Brendon Urie himself was onstage.

_ Mama said don’t give up _

_ It’s a little complicated _

_ All tied up, no more love _

_ And I’d hate to see you waiting _

Dazed, Chasten finally let out a breath. He didn't realize it until that moment, but he’d been holding it since the night of their first date.

* * *

“It’s going to work,” Chasten said as soon as the hotel room door slammed shut behind them. “This crazy fucking plan is actually going to work.”

Pete was vibrating. He paced the outline of the room, turning on every light for no reason, suppressing manic little tremors of a grin. He made no move to escape when Chasten interrupted and pushed him against the wall.

“The next time I fuck you,” he whispered in his ear, heartbeat fast and shallow and hot, “I’ll be fucking the next President of the United States.” The line was theatrical and cheap, but he felt his husband’s breath hitch at it anyway, his knees weaken, just imperceptibly.

“There’s so much left to do,” Pete said. He was speaking too quickly, pitch of his voice high, words unable to keep pace with his thoughts. “We have formidable opponents. It’s going to take everything we have. We have to be prepared to fight through the convention.” He paused. A dazzled grin lit his face. “But yes, at the end of it, I’m going to be the next fucking President of the United States.”

Chasten started kissing, shaky hands acting of their own accord to unknot Pete’s tie. Pete’s left hand rose to interrupt, to lace his fingers with Chasten’s.

“And you, sir,” Pete said, returning the whisper, “are going to do so much more than just pick out the White House china.”

“We’ll save the world. We’ll kill terrorists. We’ll mandate theater training.”

“And that’s just the first hundred days.”

They laughed. Their hands ran into each other like clumsy high schoolers’ as each one struggled to take control.

Finally Chasten stopped. He was out of breath. “Take one moment,” he panted. “Take one moment to enjoy this. Take one moment to enjoy what we’ve done.”

Pete’s voice ached with admiration. “What _ you _did. You’re the only person who could have imagined this. You saw it, you made it, and tonight there was an entire arena chanting our name.” Pete leaned his forehead against his husband’s, closed his eyes. Chasten could see every detail of his lashes. They looked like an artist’s quick fast pencil strokes, but real, and his.

They said nothing for a moment. Pete was the one to break the silence.

“Can you imagine,” he finally breathed. “Going back to that first date… And telling ourselves…” He swallowed, and smiled, eyes still closed. _“That we actually did it?”_

Chasten replied by spinning him around and pushing him onto the bed. Their laughter sounded like teenagers’ after prom.

“Stop, stop,” Pete giggled. The absurdity of Pete giggling made Chasten giggle. “_Stop_. Let me hang up the suit first. You’re wrinkling it.”

“Okay, but for fuck’s sake, hurry up.”

Satisfied, every limb shaking, he settled on the bed, took out his phone, and through force of tired habit checked Twitter.

His thumb scrolled past dozens of replies. The feeling of elation that had been floating in his throat suddenly began to sink.

_ Omg. Did you just lie about your seat?!?! _

_ I always thought you looked kinda shady . _

_ Kudos to him for flying commercial!! I hope the Q3 FEC report is available, I’m personally curious to see whether @PeteButtigieg matched or beat his $300k Q2 charter flight spending; and how much the 4 day luxury coach and custom full bus wrap job cost. _

_ Ooo. Not a fan of first spouses who lie. We've had enough of that sh*t for the last 3 years. _

_ Are you searching Twitter for your name bring mentioned? _

_ Why are you lying? What’s the point? _

_ When people lie about stupid little things~ it’s just a warning that they will lie about everything. _

Half-changed, Pete ducked out of the bathroom to dig in his suitcase for toiletries. When he saw Chasten on his phone, immobilized, he offered a suggestion of his own.

“I saw a great video today,” he said, obliviously returning to the bathroom.

“What was it?” He quickly closed Twitter, ready for a new assignment.

The faucet turned on and off. Pete started brushing his teeth. “Know how the Daily Show posts those short vintage clips of cable news hosts losing their minds at non-existent Obama scandals?”

A smile cracked Chasten’s face. “Yes, I’m familiar.”

“They put out a new one this morning. Apparently the Obamas once had the nerve to go on a date night in New York, and Fox was pissed about it.” Chasten heard him spit into the sink with a disgusted relish. “Hypocrites, every single one. We’re going to clobber them. Iron fists in velvet gloves. You’re moving to Michigan and Wisconsin, okay? We’re sending you door-to-door to every single house in every single county if that’s what it takes. Neither of us is getting a single night’s rest for the next decade.”

Chasten hesitated, but searched for the video and began to watch.

_ In June 2009, a scandal like no other rocked the Obama presidency to its core… _

A Fox anchor. _ “President Obama and the First Lady are taking their tradition of date night on the road this weekend.” _

A Fox and Friends host. _ “They went out to dinner and they went to see a Broadway show. And they had an extravagant date night.” _

_ “They took a small Gulfstream jet - ” _

_ “Traffic is stopped, as you can see. The show waited 45 minutes.” _

Hannity, disgusted: _ “They want to go to Broadway, they want to go out to dinner, they hold hands…” _

_ “I’m just saying, the taxpayer expense - ” _

_ “She should have acquiesced to a less extravagant date night.” _

Hannity again: _ “It is inappropriate when a country is suffering - ” _

Fox’s religion correspondent:_ “Think about the message that President Obama and Mrs. Obama are giving to their two daughters, that we’d be willing to disrupt other people’s lives around - ” _

He suddenly staggered out of bed and starting throwing up into the hotel room ice bucket.

Just before the final retch, he felt a cold washcloth against the back of his neck. He looked up. Pete was standing beside him. “You okay?”

He bit his lip and nodded.

“What happened? What did you eat?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sick?”

Chasten suddenly realized he had a headache, and that he had had a headache all night, and maybe all year. He whispered. “I don’t know." He tried to catch his breath. "I think I should sleep on the couch though. Just in case.”

"If you're worried about passing germs, I think that ship has sailed."

Chasten grimaced. “Please. Just to be safe.” He moaned. “God, if you puke on reporters during the bus tour, Lis will throw me under that bus, then drive over me herself.”

Pete couldn’t argue with that. “Fine. But you take the bed.” He took the ice bucket from Chasten’s hands. Chasten weakly, wearily laid back down, too tired to protest such an insensible arrangement.

“Sleep well. Think of what we’ve done. Think of everything we’re going to do.”

“I think for now I’ll just take tonight.”

“Fair enough.”

Pete brushed his warm fingertips across Chasten’s forehead. Chasten froze at the gesture. He closed his eyes tight to recover, to reset, to try to remember why.

* * *

_ Didn't have a dime but I always had a vision! _

_ Always had high, high hopes! _

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he muttered to the too-loud jukebox in his head, rolling over until he collided with his sleeping husband’s shoulder.

He struggled up onto his elbows in the dark and blurry hotel room.

He’d fallen asleep in his suit, but someone had taken off his shoes, and now they were resting on the couch, next to a change of clothes for the morning.

There was a blanket draped over him.

A man and a woman’s laughter drifted distantly down the hotel hallway.

He blinked at the nightstand. It looked like a mirage of over-preparation. There were his glasses, neatly folded. The ice bucket, washed clean and set out to dry. Two mints. Two washcloths. A glass of water. A generous tip for the housekeeping staff. A handwritten note - “C: Puke there” - with an arrow pointing down. He looked down. On the floor next to the bed was the room’s trash can, lined with one of the plastic grocery bags that Pete kept in his suitcase, that Chasten always ribbed him for having and said he’d never use.

He stared at his husband’s serenely unconscious face, awed by the neuroticism of the thoughtfulness.

To his disgust, the internal jukebox, unstoppable, played on.

_ The weird and the novelties _

_ Don't ever change _

_ We wanted everything, wanted everything _

Finally he just pulled Pete’s hand to his chest, rolled back over, and fell back asleep.

* * *

November 2, 2019

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Lis muttered. She turned away from Pete and yelled above the din of journalists in the bus. “Does anyone here have Emergen-C?”

* * *

["Chasten Buttigieg Is Involved in Drama About Airplane Seats: What is going on here and why?"](https://www.out.com/celebs/2019/11/01/chasten-buttigieg-involved-drama-about-airplane-seats) \- Out Magazine, November 1, 2019


	12. December 15, 2016: New York, New York

Christmas was coming, which meant it had been a year since she’d last fucked Eliot Spitzer. He’d been a mistake, but every man was a mistake, so it wasn’t like the implosion had been a surprise. Publicly, she’d dictated the terms. Held the leash, so to speak.

Even so, the anniversary reminded her why Christmas breakups were always the worst. Everyone was so lost in tinsel, preoccupied by their shoddily-built illusions of holiday happiness and attendant delusions of how others’ lives ought to go. Dinner party hypocrites were always insufferable, but something about the time of year made her want to weaponize fork tines.

Oh, you and Eliot aren’t together anymore? _(What do you want, a reward for being right? A carnival prize? A goldfish in a bag? Because I can get you a fucking goldfish in a bag.)_

When will you settle down? _(How about never, bitch?)_

When will you have kids? _(What child is awful enough to deserve being doomed to me?)_

Why’d you risk your reputation? _(Risk a reputation? I made one.)_

Why’d you risk your career? _(Politics isn’t the only place where someone competent can make a mark. In fact, some would say - )_

Oh, darling, but wasn’t working in politics always your _drrrream?,_ with a pitying, self-satisfied trill on the pretentiously rolled ‘r.’

Well, fuck you and fuck them, and especially fuck their sugary sweet gingerbread houses with the candied windows. Gingerbread houses always end up stale and crumbling and thrown away by New Year’s, anyway. It was enough to make a woman long for the bleak January day, coming soon enough, when everyone would be honest and unhappy together again.

After the relationship ended, she realized that fucking Spitzer’s disgraced ass had been like fucking the corpse of modern American politics itself. The fundamental core of purpose was gone. They were spent-down fuel rods. Radioactive. At first she’d been intrigued by the idea of nuclear winter, but once she actually lived it, she found its empty nihilism boring; she was, as ever, restless to find the next thing. House of Cards. Celebrity Apprentice: White House. Clever monologue after clever monologue from Colbert, Meyers, Oliver, Bee...all while Rick Perry ascended to lead the department he famously couldn’t name in a campaign-ending debate performance four years before. She’d cackled giddily then; she cackled giddily now, but for new reasons. What was American politics anymore if not entertainment, cheap inspiration for a show, a shittily written story? A parade of pawns and puppets? At the end of the day, the fucker with the most cash wins, and a free man with morals doesn’t have the budget to play the stage. Take your money, take your man, whoever he may be. Be happy in New York and with all the distractions in it. Bury alive the little girl who knew in her bones that frantic excellence might actually improve the republic. What a quaint, old-fashioned word: republic.

This line of thought was why she couldn’t stop thinking about the two fresh-faced boyfriends from Indiana. They were so skillfully both old and entirely new. She wondered if they had, through cunning or precocity or sheer dumb luck, stumbled on the answer to Trumpism. Sure, they were ambitious liars, but who in Washington wasn’t? The difference was that they seemed willing to lie for the greater good, not solely for their own benefit. And as far as she could tell, they were in love: genuinely, disgustingly besotted by the other’s unnervingly specific skill set. Their relationship was the sweet, salty cocktail that she hadn’t realized she’d been so thirsty for.

So far, every spare December moment had been spent memorizing every interview she could find with Pete, every bullet point of strategy that Chasten had proposed. She became vaguely aware she was teetering toward addiction. Her other work began suffering. “We’re done here,” she’d said in bed earlier that week, rolling off a gasping date and onto her nest of pillows, extending a bare arm out to the tablet beside her to continue her research. The resulting argument ended with his swearing and leaving her apartment. So be it. He was a kind, wealthy, and unmarried man, and as long as the birth control kept working, she didn’t give a shit.

The last man she would have thought capable of snapping her out of the inertia of cynicism was a thirty-something gay mayor from fucking South Bend, Indiana. But with every day that passed, and every phone call they’d shared, she began to allow herself to imagine more, and then a tiny bit more, and then a tiny bit more. Finally, one night, she actually dreamt of her slight, brainy, preternaturally calm client - who she knew, in the dream, had been well-prepared, because she herself had been the one to prepare him - striding confidently across a two-podiumed stage to reach out and shake the tiny bronzed hand of American fascism. That night her own gasps had awoken her. She eventually admitted to herself (quietly) that the thrill of that particular dream was more intense than any night she’d spent with any man.

* * *

  
Their corporate client had left them out to dry, again. Lis and her colleague Phil were sitting at opposite ends of a long conference table, ignoring the other while pretending to study the carefully constructed communications strategy that they were about to propose.

Every five minutes, a frazzled intern would poke her head in the door to let them know their client would be five minutes.

Lis happily embraced the identity of workaholic; she'd never been able to do anything halfway. But after half an hour of being ignored, she broke. She bit her tongue and dug around her bag for a folder. After opening and paging through it, she retreated to her phone, hammering and swiping at it.

At her sudden sharp intake of breath, Phil glanced up.

“Goddamn lying piece of goddamn motherfucking _shit_,” she said.

A moment of silence.

“Are you talking to me?” Phil asked, calmly turning a page.

“Just a fucking client,” she said. The words spit out. “Literally, a fucking client.”

“The gay mayor client?”

She didn’t answer. She was distracted now, and swiping furiously.

Phil returned, self-satisfied, to his notes. “I warned you not to fall in love too fast,” he said, relishing the chance to be world-weary. “He was too good to be true.”

“Yeah, forgive me if I don’t take love advice from you.”

He shrugged. “Fine. Keep listening to whatever sage thought Spitzer was worth torpedoing a career over.”

Lis rose to her feet. Usually she stood strong and straight, no matter how tall and spiky her heels, but this time, the adrenaline rush was making her knees wobble. She pressed the tips of her fingers on the conference tabletop to keep her balance. “You should be fucking glad I torpedoed my career,” she said between clenched teeth, “because if I hadn’t fucked Spitzer, de Blasio wouldn’t have fired me, and if de Blasio hadn’t fired me, I would have gotten a bigger better job, and if I would have gotten a bigger better job, I wouldn’t have been available to join your little agency, and if I hadn’t been available to join your little agency, then your little agency would be doing nothing besides the absolutely meaningless jackshit we’re doing right now. I elevate you, you sleazy, sexist motherfucker. I elevate you like a pair of fucking Louboutins.”

Phil’s voice was wearily resigned. “You are remembering a past that didn't happen and talking to a man who doesn't exist. And if you’re still using that kind of language when our client gets into the room, after all the work we’ve done on this project… I will literally shoot you in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and that, my friend, is not hyperbole.”

She cackled. “Are you fucking joking? The client’s not getting into the room any time soon. The client’s probably having trouble getting it up for a lunchtime call girl.” She packed up her folder. She threw her phone into her bag. She seethed. “When they do get back,” she finally said, tightly, “tell them they kept me waiting so long that my fucking bladder burst. I’ll be in the bathroom. Text me when you need me.”

“Or maybe I’ll just do the presentation on my own.”

“Maybe you fucking should, asshole,” she said, stalking out.

“Stop falling in love,” was Phil’s farewell.

She slammed the door behind her and shot the frazzled intern the bird.

* * *

She dialed a number in the hallway and called it as she burst into the men’s restroom. With every passing ring she grew more irritated. When he finally picked up, she was so furious, she couldn’t hear straight.

“Hi,” she said, resorting to a saccharine telemarketer’s tone before she exploded completely to an innocent. “Is this Mr. Glezman?”

“Yes, this is Mr. Glezman. Is this Lis?”

“That's Ms. motherfucking Smith to you. Say, I don’t know what kind of twisted presidential roleplay you and your boyfriend are into, but if you could leave me the fuck out of it from now on, I’d appreciate it.”

He paused. “Um, I’m volunteering at the food pantry with some kids,” he said. “If you could just give me a moment…”

This was the final straw. “I don’t have a moment! And I don’t give a rat’s ass about kids or your fucking food pantry. Fuck! Cunt! Rimjob! Can the kids fucking hear me? I hope they can fucking hear me, Glezman!”

She found his terrified hiss deeply satisfying. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I got the list of exes you sent over. Still swear by it?”

She heard mumbled apologies, then the sound of traffic. He must have found a way outside. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Game, set, match, motherfucker. Before I sent it over to the big boys at oppo research, I took a stab at your list myself. And I’m glad I didn’t waste their time.”

“It wasn’t that long.”

“Oh, it was long enough. You say here that in 2008, you spent a few months dating a Gentleman X. So I look up Gentleman X. I do the arduous backbreaking labor of Googling for ninety fucking seconds, and surprise, surprise, I find a Flickr account under Gentleman X’s name.” She began texting while she talked. “And guess whose angelic smiling face I found toward the back of one of the albums. In photos from 2009. When, according to the list, you say you were exclusive with Gentleman Y.”

“We stayed friends for a while; I - ”

“Look at the photos, Glezman.”

She heard nothing except the whir of traffic. If she hadn’t heard that, she would have wondered if their connection had broken. It took twenty or thirty heartbeats, but gradually, as if someone had injected it into her veins, she began to feel just the smallest inkling of pity.

“I’m not Pete,” she said to the silence. “I don’t give a fuck who you fucked. I only care that you fucked with me.”

“I recognize the house,” he finally said. “A few of us had parties. There was alcohol. Some drugs. Typical teenager stuff. It was such a long time ago; I don’t - ”

Her laugh was high and bitter. “‘Such a long time ago’? It was fucking 2009. If your affair was a human, it would still be playing with dolls and ordering Happy Meals.”

“I didn’t have an affair!”

“Have dictionaries not reached the Midwest yet?”

“Shut the _fuck_ up, Smith,” and, without realizing it, she flinched as if she’d been slapped. She hadn’t heard that tone of voice from him before. She was suddenly, against her better judgment, more intrigued than ever. “I’m not paying you to moralize. I’m paying you to message.”

The restroom door opened. An older gentleman ambled in, then, seeing her, froze and squinted in confusion. Lis held a manicured hand over her phone. “What are you looking at?” she demanded.

“This is the men’s room,” he said. He nodded toward the urinals, implying that her estrogen had somehow blinded her. Her rage metastasized.

“Do you seriously think I can’t see that? The ladies’ is always a fucking mess; I’m not taking calls in there. Piss the fuck off.”

Without a word, he backed away.

“Glezman!" she barked into the phone. "Are you still in touch with these gentlemen?”

“No.”

“How’d things end?”

A reluctant hesitation. “Well...”

“Do they hold a grudge against you? For what?”

Nothing but traffic noise again, God damn every fucking man on earth to hell: gay, straight, and everything in between. She set the phone to speaker, turned on a faucet, and let the hot water pour over her hands. She wanted steam in her face as soon as possible. Steam cleared her lungs. It helped her think, and clearly she'd have to be doing a lot of thinking.

“Set aside what this was or wasn’t,” she finally said, breathing in the hot mist. “If you really want to be a 1950s housewife cheerleader… If you’re going to devote the rest of your fucking life to the pursuit and the power of the presidency…” She paused, hoping that each of those unfinished sentences would sink in. “Would _anyone_ try to use _anything_ from your past to stop you?”

Again, no answer. So she brought out her rhetorical knife.

“Would anyone use you against Pete?”

With satisfaction, she saw that she’d finally figured out how to carve him up. She stepped back and watched his blood run out. “Don’t tell Peter. I need to…” A moment of whirring silence, and it was as if she could feel the cold Indiana wind on her own face. “I don’t know what I need to do, but I don’t remember these photos, I swear. Don’t tell Peter. I need time; I need...” He didn't finish.

She considered for a moment, turned off the hot water, and dried her hands. “You are fucking pathetic,” she said. “I wish I could feel superior to you in good conscience.”

He didn’t argue the point. She threw the paper towel away, turned the phone off of speaker, and leaned against the tile wall.

“What do I do, Lis?” His voice was small and focused. It sounded very afraid.

Lis sighed. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her thoughts drifted. “Do you think I’d make a good politician?” she said.

His “yes” was so immediate and so without qualification that she smiled, bitterly.

“Well,” she said. “I’d love to be a politician. But I can’t be. You know why? Because I’ve made some dumbfuck mistakes, just like you.” She looked down at her shoes, at her feet. A doctor had told her once that if she kept wearing such high heels, her hips and spine would be shot by the time she turned forty. She’d told him to go fuck himself; he knew nothing about what her world was like. Maybe someday the shoes would kill her, but in the meantime, they were her armor, and they were indispensable. “Here’s the thing about American politics,” she said. “Straight saggy white washed-up men like Donald fucking Trump can get away with murder. _They_ make out with an ex when they’re drunk and 19? Nobody gives a shit. They assault a woman? Nobody gives a shit. They assault a hundred women? They brag about it on tape and they get elected president. But you and I aren’t straight men, Chasten. We’re just insatiable, irresponsible whores.”

“It’s not fair,” she heard him breathe.

“Yeah, newsflash: it’s not. It never has been. Might never be. But you have to play the game before you can change the rules. You both have to be unimpeachable.” She hacked a laugh. “In Pete’s case, literally.”

He didn’t laugh. She sighed and softened, just a little, despite herself.

“I can make an affair go away, Chasten. Fuck, I can make lots of things go away. But you have to tell me the truth first.”

More goddamned traffic noises. Where the hell did they make poor people eat in Indiana, on the fucking Interstate? She imagined him pacing in the back parking lot of a warehouse, breath white in the air. “I have to go,” he finally said. “Again, I just want to reiterate: don’t tell Peter.”

She was impressed by how quickly he’d been able to collect himself. It was a hopeful sign. “I won’t say anything,” she said. “But Schmuhl’s the one signing my paycheck, and I can’t keep this from him. I’ll tell him to give you some time to come clean. But I know where Schmuhl’s loyalties lay. And they sure as fuck aren’t with us. So just… Get your story straight.”

“Okay.” He sounded a little weak, maybe, but resolved. For the first time, she could imagine an outside scenario in which her confidence in him might return. It was a long shot, but… What was another long shot in a campaign full of long shots? Fucking hell, she needed a drink.

“Then,” she said, “when you have your story, let me know what it is. Because I can’t work for this campaign if you don’t tell me the truth. Remember what I told you when we met? Remember what pisses me off the most?”

“Fucking incompetence.”

“You promised me competence, Glezman. In fact, you promised me excellence. You’d better fucking get me it, or I’m out before this shitshow even starts. I have a very happy life ahead of me working for corporate clients. I don’t need you nearly as much as you and your boyfriend apparently need me. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Have a nice Christmas break,” she said. She decided to kick him one last time. Make sure he’d bled out completely, as he deserved. “If you pick up another ex to add to the list, let me know. Don’t cross me again.”

She didn’t hang up. She just held the phone instead. It was an old trick she used at the end of tough calls, when she was trying to assess the state of the person on the other end. Some men would start ranting. Some would start crying. This one, interestingly, did nothing. In fact, she had the feeling he was pulling the same trick on her. She smiled to herself. Ultimately, he was the one to acknowledge defeat. He hung up.

She ignored the five angry texts she’d gotten from Phil and sailed through her S contacts until she landed on Mike fucking Schmuhl. His phone rang and rang and rang. His inattention made her want to take one of her heels and bash it repeatedly on a urinal.

Finally she reached his genial voicemail greeting. He always sounded serene, like he ran a shitty Youtube meditation channel. It was so blindingly obvious that between the four of them, he was the biggest snake of all.

“Hi, Mike,” she said, doing her best to swallow her disdain. “This is Lis Smith calling from New York, where I’m currently skipping out of an important meeting and hiding out in a men’s room to try to talk to you. Look, I know you don’t like me, and I know you don’t trust me, and I know there's nothing I can do to keep you from passive-aggressively refusing to answer your phone when I call. But no matter what you think, I’m fucking good at my job, and I want the same thing that you and Pete want. And I’m about to give you something that proves it. You should start trusting me. And jumping through fucking flaming hoops to pick up for me. That’s all I have to say. Call me back sometime, you cowardly, non-confrontational fuck. You're not going to make your high school buddy president by yourself.”

* * *

December 21, 2016

South Bend, Indiana

The day was so short, the sun had risen, only to immediately set again.

Mike walked around the hood of his car and stepped up onto the curb. Hidden between his coat and his sweater was a thin folder, protected in the warmth from the drifting snowflakes.

He turned off the ringer on his phone, looked up at the big white house in front of him, and took a deep breath.

* * *

_"Men are great; they have their benefits, but..."- _[Lis Smith](https://twitter.com/team_lis_smith/status/1187444656004579330), Badass Women of the Democratic Presidential Campaigns CNN forum, October 24, 2019


	13. June 15, 2022: Washington, D.C.

He’d strode down the hallway so many times in his dreams that it was surreal to do it in real life. The river of staffers parted for them, their expressions smiling and adoring. It secretly annoyed him how happy Jennifer made them, when lately she only seemed to live to irritate him. She kept reaching out to swipe her little hand against the portraits on the wall, and he kept yanking her arm away, embarrassed to be seen. He did so especially hard after a Secret Service agent cast a disapproving glance.

He was just about to knock on the closed door of the Oval Office. “Mr. Buttigieg?” a bright voice interrupted. “I have to ask that you not go in right now. Thank you.”

That damned receptionist, always doing Peter’s dirty work. “It’s one o’ clock,” he said between gritted teeth. “He’s expecting us.”

“I’m sorry. You’re not on the schedule today.”

“But I told Peter - ” He stopped and started again. “I told _the President_ that I’d be stopping by at one. And it’s one.”

She stayed relentlessly cheery. “You still need an appointment.”

“We’re his husband and daughter.”

She smiled sympathetically. “I’m aware, sir. The President was very clear. He’s to see nobody unless they have an appointment.”

Fuck it. “We’re going in,” and he put his hand on the doorknob.

Her voice rose. “Sir, I must warn you, if you open that door, there will be consequences. They’re discussing sensitive national security matters.”

“I - ” Jennifer pulled at his wrist so suddenly and so hard that he almost tripped over. “Jennifer, _stop_.” He wrestled to control her arm as he spoke. “For God’s sake, I’m planning his mother’s funeral. It’s not like I’m going in there to fuck him over the Resolute desk.” He flushed. What the hell was wrong with him?

The receptionist stiffened, but she ignored the vulgarity. “Are your offices not communicating, sir?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Have you spoken to your chief of staff, sir? Director of operations? Perhaps they could arrange - ”

“I shouldn’t need a fucking director of operations to see my fucking husband. I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I didn’t get much sleep...” Suddenly Jennifer was wandering over to the receptionist’s desk, standing on tiptoe, and rearranging the various office supplies on its surface. He crouched down beside his daughter. “Jennifer Montgomery Buttigieg,” he hissed, “you need to keep your damn hands to yourself.” As soon as he said the words he felt the burn of the receptionist's hard gaze on his face. He looked up, suddenly panicked. “Don’t tell anyone I said that. I didn’t mean…” He broke off mid-sentence. “Was it you?”

“I’m sorry?” the receptionist said, her voice close to breaking with politeness.

“You were here, the day Peter and I argued. You would have heard us.”

“Which argument, sir?” she said.

Oh, fuck her. “The broken vase argument,” he said, although he knew he didn’t need to.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Well, it wasn’t Peter who leaked it, so it had to be one of us.”

She looked horrified. “It’s true?”

Shit. “I - ” Suddenly Jennifer was back at the desk, rifling through papers like a miniature spy. _“Jennifer!”_ he snapped. He tried desperately to think of another distraction technique. He didn't want to remember that he'd forgotten every single thing he’d learned about child development in college. “Let’s play a game. Let’s play the statue game.”

The suggestion made her root all the faster. “I don’t want to be a statue. I’m tired of being a statue.”

“I’ll play, too,” he offered helplessly.

“You aren’t a statue!” she screamed. Staffers turned around. The receptionist raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, I _am_,” he insisted, with venom. ‘We both are. We must be very still and very quiet, and all we’re allowed to do is watch.”

A new voice interrupted. “That game’s fucked up as shit, Jennifer. Girls should never play the statue game.”

Jennifer screamed again, this time in delight. “Aunt Lis!”

Lis came striding down the hall. “Eh, just Lis is fine. Chasten, what the fuck are you two doing here?”

“We live here.”

“Solid comeback, admittedly. Can I talk to you for a moment? Without the kid?”

He was getting so desperate he didn’t care who saw. He stood up. “As long as you can get me in to see Peter. I just need five minutes.”

“You overestimate the clout of a communications director. That’s a request for the chief of staff.”

“Ha. Very funny,” he muttered.

Lis shrugged. “It’s the truth. It’s how Pete runs his administration.” She bent down to talk to Jennifer. “I need your father for, like, ten seconds.” Lis started removing her shoes, reaching out for Chasten's shoulder for balance as she did. “Never too early for a girl to learn. These are called Jimmy Choos. They are extremely expensive. Enjoy.”

Jennifer immediately clambered into them, to his dismay. “Lis, that heel’s half as tall as she is.”

“Great,” she said. “Then she falls and has to be stitched up and you get five minutes of fucking peace. Come on.”

Lis continued down the hall. He looked at his wobbling daughter, holding on to the desk in a desperate attempt to keep her balance, then apologetically at the receptionist. “Can you watch her, please? I’ll only be a minute.” He didn’t stick around to see the disapproving nod. It was an immeasurable relief to leave them both behind.

Lis’s office was small and compact, the bookshelves lined with presidential biographies, lavishly photographed histories of various alcoholic drinks, and at least two coffeemakers. A mini-fridge of beer hummed in the corner. She closed the door. “Have you read the proofs of your brother’s book?”

“Shit.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re fucking kidding me. You are _fucking kidding me_, right?”

How could he have forgotten? What else was he forgetting? What was wrong with him? “I haven’t read the proofs. I’ll do it tonight after I put Jennifer to bed; I - ”

“Do you have any idea what getting those proofs was like? It was like planning fucking D-Day. I’m not even sure everything we did was fucking legal. But none of that means anything _if you don’t fucking read them_, you idiot.”

“I’m sorry; I’m sorry. It’s just with Anne - ” His throat tightened.

Her face softened. She sat down on the edge of her desk. “I’m sorry about Anne,” she said, looking at the floor. When he didn’t say anything more, she glanced up, reached across her desk, and wordlessly passed him a Kleenex.

“Did you know,” he said, taking off his glasses to wipe at his eyes, “that’s more than Peter’s said.”

“Don’t blame the alien for not expressing emotion.” She reached out a hand for the Kleenex and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. “If he can’t feel anything, more power to him. He has shit to do.”

He put his glasses back on. He felt dizzy. “This presidency is a fucking pyre,” he said, “and every single one of us is just waiting in line to jump into it.”

She barked a laugh. “That would be a great opening line for a memoir. Very reminiscent of Michelle Obama.”

“God, stop talking to me about the fucking memoir.”

“You need the fucking memoir. Ideally, you would have had the fucking memoir before Rhyan’s fucking memoir, and if you would have listened to me, you would have, but _ no _, everything was going just great in the early days and you were having so much fun playing Jackie Kennedy at your fucking tea parties. Well, look at you now.”

“I get it; I’m betraying my husband’s legacy. Cut me some slack. What do the proofs say?”

She took a breath. “Well,” she said, rearranging the pens on her desk. “Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Granted, Rhyan’s no Bob Woodward. People who like you already will just laugh. But he’ll get the Fox News crowd on board the train in no time. And honestly, Bob Woodward might not be too far behind. It’s not like there’s nothing there.”

“Everything?” he said again.

“You come out looking like… Well, who you really are.”

He stared at her.

“At least you've proven your acting abilities,” she offered. “Maybe you’ll get a part on a real TV show after this. I feel like you deserve better than Dancing With the Stars.”

He was horrified at her blasé attitude. “How am I just learning about this now?”

“You tell me. I’ve been trying to book a meeting for the past three days. I just assumed you stopped caring.”

“Well, you should have pushed harder. I do care. I care very much.”

“Then what the hell’s wrong with your staff? Are they fucking sabotaging you?”

An idea suddenly occurred to him. He stiffened. “Are you?”

“What?”

Things felt immediately clearer. “You’re my mirror,” he said. “You’ve always been my mirror. And that’s what I’d do if I wanted to destroy me. I’d start by bungling the response to Rhyan’s book.”

“What the fuck?”

“With me discredited, you're next in line to get Peter. To get the president.”

She cackled again. “Peter will never fuck me.”

“Fucking is secondary to Peter,” he said. “It always has been. It’s about who he trusts. It’s about who has his ear.” Another realization crashed upon him. “It was you, wasn’t it? You were the source. You sold the Oval Office story.” He felt close to tears at the betrayal. “You fucking bitch.”

She reached out a hand and placed it on his. He pulled it away. “Chasten,” she said. “Are you okay?” She tilted her head. The edge of her black bob fell away from her face. “How have you been sleeping?”

“Not well.”

There was a quiet knock at the door. Mike stepped in, a thick binder in his hand. “Lis, here are those polls about the midterm races. The response is going to require some kind of coordination. Oh,” he said, suddenly seeing Chasten.

“Mike.”

“Good afternoon.” He handed the binder over to Lis, who immediately attacked it. “Well. The prodigal son returns, huh? Been quite a while since you’ve come over here.”

“My plate’s pretty full,” Chasten said, hoping his stress was self-evident.

“Maybe get a bigger plate,” Mike suggested. “At this point we need all the help we can get.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Lis muttered. She looked up. She came close to shrieking. “We might lose the fucking House?”

“It’s looking like a plausible scenario.”

Chasten felt his irritation growing in tandem with his despair. “Please don't joke about shit like that,” he said. “I've had the week from hell.”

Uneasy silence.

“Chasten,” Lis said, carefully. “How busy have those fucking tea parties kept you?”

“They’re not fucking tea parties; they’re fucking state dinners. They’re fucking diplomacy.”

“If it’s got hor d’eourves, it’s a fucking tea party.”

He was increasingly convinced that nobody in this city understood anything about anything. “Just shut up,” he said.

But Lis did not shut up. “Where have you fucking been? For God’s sake, you’re the First Gentleman of the United States. Read a fucking newspaper. Turn on fucking CNN. Read this fucking binder.”

She extended it to him. He hesitated a moment before taking it and paging through. His breath slowed, then seemed to stop altogether, and he felt a rushing roar in his head.

“What - ” he said, unable to finish. He saw the future suddenly, as if it was a dark landscape suddenly illuminated by a crack of lightning. A Republican-controlled House. Every legislative priority stymied and sabotaged. Impeachment: because in 2023, post-Trump, it would be an impeachable offense just to be a Democratic president. Dragging Mike, Lis, and everyone else on staff to the Hill to testify over evidence of every backroom deal, every moment where they had pushed the envelope or broken the mold.

Mike’s tone was low and soothing. If nuclear war ever broke out, he’d deliver the news as calmly as the weather forecast. “Klobuchar’s difficulties at DOJ are weighing us down,” he said. “Conservatives think Trump is being prosecuted unfairly. Liberals think Trump is being prosecuted badly. We’re losing everyone. I told you all, there’s a reason why Ford pardoned Nixon.” He glanced accusingly at Lis. “And there’s a reason why you don’t make a woman attorney general just because she helped your campaign in an October primary debate once.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Lis said. “Schmuhl was a coward then and he’s still a coward now. Trump broke the law. He broke many laws. He had to pay, even if _to_ pay we had to use every cent of Pete’s political capital.”

Mike was stubborn. “That’s the difference between you and me. I was trying to protect Pete. I saw this coming. The next president will know better.”

Chasten interrupted the simmering argument. He was at the front of the binder, fingers drifting down the overview chart. “This downturn,” he said, pointing at it. “The dates coincide. How much does the story…” He swallowed. “About Pete and me arguing in the Oval…” He didn’t finish.

“Well,” Lis said after a long silence. “It didn’t help.”

“The problem with that rumor is that it undermines a lot of positive assumptions that people have about both you and Pete,” Mike said. “If they can’t trust that he’s level-headed and kind, and if they can’t trust that you’re telling the truth about his being level-headed and kind… Then honestly, there’s not a lot left to trust. Of either of you.” He hesitated. “Is it true?”

“Jesus, Mike,” Lis snapped. “Truth doesn’t matter. You know that.”

He shrugged defensively. “I’m chief of staff. Don’t I deserve to know? Especially if we lose the House over it?”

Lis scoffed. “We’re not going to lose the House over it. It would just be one thing out of - ”

Chasten interrupted. His voice and gaze were steely. “If it was true,” he told Mike, “you’d be the last person in the world I’d confirm it to.” The subject was closed.

Mike sighed. Then, unexpectedly: “We need you back, Chasten,” he said. “We’re in deep trouble. It was the three of us that got him here. Even if we kill each other once it’s all over, we need to stick together.”

“I have responsibilities now,” Chasten replied, archly. “You know how many hours Pete has been working. Now Anne’s dead. I’m not handing my daughter off to a stranger. I don't know anyone in Washington. I’m practically a single father.”

“And who made that mistake,” Mike said. It wasn’t a question.

Chasten took a pencil from Lis’s desk and snapped it in half. “I think we’re done here,” he said. “Can you get me five minutes with Peter, Mike? I have to talk to him about his mother’s funeral arrangements.”

They stared at each other. Mike looked at the broken pencil. He was the first to break. “I’ll see if he’s done with the Joint Chiefs,” he said, and he turned around and stepped out.

Chasten followed Lis. He’d never walked behind her when she was shoeless before; even when she wasn’t wearing heels, she carried her weight on the balls of her feet. Nothing was capable of pushing that woman down. He found himself admiring that, and sadly wishing he had that buoyant quality himself.

They turned the corner to the entrance to the Oval. The receptionist was typing placidly at her keyboard, and his daughter had vanished. Suddenly Chasten’s blood froze in his veins. What had he done, leaving her there? He couldn’t trust anyone. Enemy governments would be delighted to seize her. He'd abandoned his own child in the hopes he could relive glory days with Lis. What the hell was wrong with him?

“Where’s Jennifer?” he called down the hall to the receptionist. He pushed past Lis. Her balance never wavered.

“Where are my shoes?” Lis asked.

“Fuck your shoes,” Chasten said.

The receptionist looked up at the approaching commotion. “Everyone is in the Oval,” she smiled. “Includes the shoes.”

"Thank God," Lis said.

Chasten cracked open the door. He realized that both Mike and Lis were right behind him. His exasperation extrapolated. The president’s mother was dead and it was affecting absolutely nothing about the routines of anyone in the White House...including the president’s. That had to change. Toward the end, Anne’s love had been the only love he could count on. He didn't always know who he was anymore, but he knew he owed her this much. “Give us five fucking minutes,” he said to the hall. “And a full five fucking minutes, not a bullshit fake two minutes. Do it for Anne.”

They both hesitated, but Mike finally nodded, and they hung back.

When he opened the door to the Oval, he saw the scene of his dreams. There was his president, his handsome husband, sleeves rolled up, taking adorably lopsided left-handed notes, blue eyes fierce and concentrated.

And, beside him, just out of his husband’s line of sight, a little girl in wobbly Jimmy Choos trying to climb the pedestal that upheld the Kennedy bust.

“Jennifer!” he screamed, and his voice startled Pete. “God _damn_ it, Peter, can’t you pay attention for five fucking seconds? Come here,” he said, whisking their daughter out of the heels. “Stop touching things.”

As soon as he said “stop touching things” she looked him straight in the eyes to make sure he was watching, then smeared her somehow-still-sticky fingers across the pedestal, leaving greasy prints. Chasten pulled at her wrist and crouched down again, squeezing her shoulders too hard, hoping that she felt the pain in her bones.

“You are being a very, very bad girl,” he said. His voice was shaking. “If you don’t stop, I’m sending you to a time-out.”

“You can’t,” she screamed.

“Oh, watch me.”

“You can’t. There aren’t any corners in this room.”

The sound of Peter’s laughter behind him made his ears burn. He tossed a death glare over his shoulder. “What the fuck are you laughing at?”

“Because technically she’s right.” Pete set down his pen and turned his attention to Jennifer. “We have to be careful. But they’re just things. Come here, darling. I’ve missed you.”

Chasten watched, biting his lip, as his daughter transformed into a delighted obedient angel, clambering onto her father’s lap. “Daddy’s been loud,” she complained, covering her ears.

“I noticed,” Pete said, glancing at Chasten and picking up his pen again. “It’s not very nice when people yell, is it?”

Chasten grit his teeth. “No,” he said. “No. I’m not letting this go. They may just be things, but they’re not our things, Jennifer, they’re the _country’s_ things, and if you break any of the country’s things, lots of people will be very, very angry with us and very, very angry with you. Because we’re not living here forever. In fact,” he said, staring at his husband, “we might be leaving sooner than we would have liked.”

Pete’s grip on his pen tightened. He wrapped a protective arm around Jennifer. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You know very well what that’s supposed to mean.”

Pete looked away. He opened a desk drawer and offered a pad of paper and a box of crayons. “Here, love,” he whispered in her ear. “Draw something. Make your own art.” The tenderness in his voice broke Chasten’s heart. Then he turned his attention to Chasten, and the ice in his voice broke his heart a second time. “What exactly did you want to see me about now that can't wait until tonight?”

“Funeral plans.”

“My own?”

How dare he not resist the dry, easy joke? Chasten felt sick. “Your mother is dead, you fucking sociopath. Your ambition killed her.”

Pete said nothing. He shifted his attention back to the little girl, who poured every crayon in the box across the desk with giggly relish.

“The stress of the presidency may have killed your mother,” Chasten said quietly, stepping forward, leaning over the desk. “But I refuse to let her death go to waste. I don’t care that you haven’t cried a single fucking tear over her in private. You are fucking crying in public. I’m fucking crying in public. We’ll make Jennifer cry in public. I’ll fucking slap you both in the faces before we go out if that’s what it takes. For you to leave a legacy, we have to tell a story, and that story requires that you pretend to be a fucking human being.”

Pete looked up at him.

There was a long moment of silence.

“Who are you?” Pete finally asked.

Chasten said nothing.

“Why did I marry you?” Pete asked.

Jennifer froze, yellow crayon in her hand. Chasten had never seen her so wide-eyed. He didn’t care. He leaned over. “You married me _to get here_,” he hissed. “And it wasn’t worth it, was it? None of this was worth it. You weren’t worth it; Jennifer wasn’t worth it; I certainly wasn’t worth it. But we’re all trapped here now, aren’t we? We can’t exactly back out now, can we? So let’s go out with a bang. Let’s put on the greatest show on earth. We only have one shot at writing this encyclopedia entry, and we’d better fucking pull out all the stops. A tragic humanizing funeral for Anne, go full Kennedy with a second baby: we’ve come this far. We’re doing all of it. You and I are building fucking Camelot.”

Pete reached beneath the desk and withdrew a phone.

Chasten stared. “What?” he asked - although he somehow already knew.

“A phone,” Pete said. His voice was calm, as calm as Mike’s. “Recording everything you’ve said.”

Suddenly Chasten could no longer feel his pulse. “You always told me you weren’t allowed to have a phone,” he said.

Pete ignored him. “You finally admitted it. You said the quiet part out loud. You want another child to win an election. That’s all I needed to hear. But I wanted a recording. Because there are a few people who need to hear this. Your mother. Your brothers. Rhyan’s coming out with a book, isn’t he? Your psychiatrist. Any social worker you try to charm for the rest of your life. And in two or six years, my divorce lawyer.”

Suddenly Pete and Jennifer were very much a unit, and Chasten was very much apart from them. “It was you,” Chasten breathed. “You told the press about our argument. Over the second adoption.”

“How did it take you this long to figure it out?”

Chasten felt like a burning castle, beams cracking, then falling. “You idiot! You fucking idiot! After all we did, after all we planned, sabotaging your own presidency to be noble - ”

“What’s worse?” Pete interrupted. “Leaking an argument that was the truth? Or faking it and then, someday, the truth of why you wanted him destroying our future son’s life?”

Chasten stared.

Behind the desk, Pete leaned back. He slowly, lovingly ran his fingers through his daughter’s hair. He rested his chin atop her head. He was protecting her from Chasten, and rightfully so. He was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the better father. There would be no second chance. No redemption. And what Pete said next clinched it.

“I’m done lying,” he said. “I’m not letting a child grow up thinking I only love them just because they were useful. That was the only reason I loved you.”

* * *

Chasten bolted upright, hair sweaty.

He'd never had a worse nightmare in his life. He was alone in a hotel bed in Florida. Louisiana? He couldn’t remember. He looked beside him. There was a glass of water on the bedside table, one sip gone from it.

He remembered the single nameless pill that Lis had quietly passed him a few months ago. “This is for your first real scandal,” she’d said, with a knowing glance. “Don't take it with alcohol. It will help you sleep.”

He had taken the little bag with the little pill in it and laughed. She wasn’t laughing. “Keep it in your luggage,” she’d said. “You don’t know when it’s going to happen.”

“How will I know if it’s my first real scandal?” he’d asked, mocking her tone.

“Oh, you’ll know,” she’d said.

Beside him on the bed was his tablet. Suddenly it came back to him what he’d see if he’d touch the screen. The 2017 photo he’d taken of Pete at the Holocaust memorial, which a reporter had found on his Instagram page, and the thousands of tweets (rightfully?) horrified that he'd comment on how attractive his boyfriend was in such a somber, sacred setting. He felt now that it was shamefully unbecoming and immature. His worst fears were being confirmed, with the entire country watching. He was a child play-acting at being a president’s spouse, too in love and too in lust to be sensible, constitutionally incapable of filling the dignified shoes of the women who had come before him.

He tried to remember more about the pill, if Lis had warned him about side effects. Maybe something about bad dreams?

He reached out a shaking hand for his phone. He dialed Peter. He knew Peter would assume the worst. He didn’t care. He needed to hear his voice.

“Peter?” he said, as soon as the ring stopped.

There was a rustle of sheets and a yawn at the other end. “Chasten?” Pete’s voice sharpened, quickly. “What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”

“Don’t ever leave me.”

“What?”

“Don’t ever leave me.”

Silence.

“Have I ever left you?” Pete asked.

Chasten hesitated for a long time. “No.”

“Have you ever left me?”

Silence again.

“Isn’t that,” Pete said, gently, “all you need to know?”

Tears rolled down Chasten’s face. He bit his lip and looked around at the darkness of the unfamiliar room surrounding him.

“I can’t do this,” Chasten said.

“I love you,” Pete said.

“I love you,” Chasten said.

They hung up. They didn’t say goodbye.

* * *

_“I want you to picture what it’s going to be like, what it’s actually going to feel like in this country, the first day the sun comes up after Donald Trump has been president,” he said on the debate stage in Ohio. “It starts out feeling like a happy thought; this particular brand of chaos and corruption will be over. But really think about where we’ll be, vulnerable, even more torn apart by politics than we are right now.”_ \- [Pete Buttigieg Isn’t Going Anywhere, _The Atlantic_, November 1, 2019](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/11/pete-buttigieg-2020-next-phase/601237/)


	14. November 20, 2019: Atlanta, Georgia

After the debate, Chasten drifted through motions: congratulations, handshakes, selfies. Anne beamed at him in _can-you-believe-this_ awe as Pete emerged unscathed. He felt a month’s worth of invisible adrenaline drain from his throat, his liver, his lungs, his heart. He felt relieved and empty. He wanted to collapse. He wanted to dance.

“They’re going to try to end it all here,” Lis had threatened backstage beforehand. “Fuck Midwestern nice. If they come for you, stab them in the fucking back.”

Pete hadn’t answered her. He’d turned to Chasten instead, intently attuned to his wan face and barely trembling hands. “I’m ready,” Pete said with confidence, as if they were the only two in the room. He was drawing on an invisible well of strength. Chasten had been terrified it was a well of delusion. It wasn’t.

Beneath the harsh lights, before the millions of eyes, came question after question: sharply asked, sharply answered. To Chasten’s utter disbelief, stopgap alliances seemed to hold. When the crowd gasped at Pete’s off-the-cuff destruction of Gabbard and Trump, coolly delivered within the span of two names and a conjunction, his jaw dropped, and Chasten found himself gripping the arm of his seat. Why had he ever worried? How had he not known he’d married a man made for this?

He was speechless when they reunited, as dazzled as he’d ever been by another human being. It was an uncomfortable feeling to be intimidated by your own soulmate. But Pete gave him the warm, shy, cheeky smile of a student who knew he had done well. And with that, they held an entire conversation in a single glance.

* * *

In the hotel room, Pete was undressing and tidying up their things. They hadn’t said much to each other yet. Chasten knew he should be helping pack, that he should be waiting on Pete hand and foot and God knows what else, but instead he was laying in bed, watching television, flipping from CNN to MSNBC to Fox in a trance. His eyes kept sliding from the crisp bright debater onstage to the ordinary man standing a few feet away, hanging up his suit in the unassuming, distinctly uncinematic hotel light.

His eyes slid back again to the television. He noticed, with quiet satisfaction, how his choice of tie color had brought out Peter’s eyes.

He remembered that the late night shows had broadcast live. He muted the television and took out his tablet and found Colbert’s monologue. It ended unexpectedly. _ “You know somewhere out there Donald Trump is going, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe I risked impeachment over Joe. Someone please tell me there’s a Hunter Buttigieg!’” _ The crowd roared. The band played. Chasten felt uneasily vulnerable, and he swallowed.

He set the tablet on the bedside table and laid down, heart racing. He couldn’t get comfortable. The pillow made a strange crinkling noise beneath him, and he felt a sharp narrow edge along the back of his neck that felt as if it might draw blood. He turned around to plump the pillow when he froze.

There was a sheet of paper.

He propped himself up on an elbow and pulled it out. Peter so often smelled faintly like ink, and the paper smelled like him. There were inscrutable scribbles and scratches about policy written around the edges, but those were just a frame to fourteen carefully composed lines in the center of the page.

_ I am the ice of windy Arctic white _

_ Snow-blind in storms of fury, sleet _

_ Wet to sting, would melt in light _

_ Whose ray I’ll never chance to meet _

_ But chance appeared, and there the sun _

_ A yellow coin to buy the blue: _

_ Eclipse the drifts of powder spun, _

_ To calm the hoary ice storm, you. _

_ Bright of wit and warm of soul; _

_ Golden keep, electric spark; _

_ Addendum to a broken whole; _

_ Ice melts apart, defies the dark. _

_ Night and day together locked, a bastion _

_ A life of time to worship light, my - _

His voice cracked. “Peter?”

The word didn’t carry very far, but Pete heard him anyway and came into the bedroom. He was dressed now in a rumpled old T-shirt. He held his blue tie, the last silky remnant of his coat of arms, in his unbearably elegant hands. “Yes?” he asked, draping it carefully on the headboard.

“Who wrote this?”

“Well.” He smiled ruefully. “Clearly not Joyce.”

Chasten’s throat went dry. The dizziness returned. “When?”

“Tonight.”

Chasten pressed. “When tonight?” although in his heart he already knew the answer, because of course.

“During the debate.”

_ (Because of course.) _

“How - ?”

“Well, we’re allowed to take notes.” He climbed into the bed and rested his chin on Chasten’s shoulder. He was like an eager-to-please child sidling up to a parent inspecting an excellent report card. That sudden proximity, combined with his wearing a shirt that smelled of home and the candles in their bedroom and the detergent he bought at Target, made every nerve in Chasten’s body stretch and ache. “‘_Snow-blind in storms of fury._ I got that during the bit with Gabbard. I think I like it.” He leaned over and squinted at what he’d written. “I’m not sure how some of the rest holds up...” His voice drifted off. Chasten blinked. “Is there a pen over there?” Pete asked. Chasten wordlessly handed him one from the bedside table. Pete took it, their fingers briefly touching, and sat up and began scratching out revisions. His blue-eyed expression was as intense as it had been onstage in front of millions, but now he was only performing for one, if he was even performing at all, and suddenly Chasten knew in his heart of hearts that he wasn’t: this poem, this man, this love was the realest thing he’d ever known.

He stared. “Who are you?” he finally asked.

Peter turned his head to look at him. His shoulders were relaxed. His crooked smile was somehow both coy and utterly sincere.

“I,” he said, “am a man in love with you.”

Chasten’s body twisted at its waist and leaned forward before he consciously understood what was happening. He tasted the breath of Pete’s exhalation. The kiss was innocent. A sweet, disbelieving brush of lips chapped by dry studio air and bright lights. A scent of mint mouthwash and toothpaste.

He leaned in for more. But Pete pulled away apologetically. He was distracted. “It’s extremely saccharine,” he said, as if the kiss had been a rigorous scholarly critique, “but to be fair, I’m very out of practice.” He shot Chasten a glance of mischief. “It has been a full four years, and your name _still_ doesn’t rhyme with any interesting words besides bastion. And even that rhyme is very imperfect.”

The insanity of the entire interaction suddenly made Chasten giggle. For reasons he didn’t understand, through the laughter, a little tiny tear crept out from the corner of his eye.

Somehow Pete noticed the tear. He set down the paper between them, turned his full attention to Chasten, and brushed the wetness away with a defiant nonchalance: acknowledging it, but ignoring it. It made him want to cry all the more. “I should never have stopped writing you poetry,” he declared. “You deserve so much more. Especially after this year. Let me do better." He softened. "Will you let me do better?” He leaned forward. Another kiss on dry lips, still innocent, but tentatively deeper this time. He held Chasten’s lip between his for an electric split second before pulling back. “Talk to me,” he said. His words were slowing and lowering. “I never get to kiss your voice anymore.”

As he came closer to exhausted, ecstatic tears, Chasten felt a tension in his voice that made its pitch rise. “You’re making it very difficult to talk,” he finally managed, and at those seven words Pete kissed his throat, tasting the salt of the sweat there just slightly, and Chasten’s very soul itself felt raw and awed and undone.

“If you can’t talk, hum,” Pete said quietly, “because I want to hear your voice,” and it was a gentle command, but a command nonetheless, and Chasten tried to obey, but the pitch of the sound began to waver, and then it turned into an unbecoming moan that made his face flush. He had a thought come to him, as if someone was thinking it on his behalf: this was not how tonight ought to go. If anyone deserved worship, it should be the man who had actually played the game, not the one who had sat trembling on the sidelines. He tried to verbalize this, to flip the dynamic, but in the face of this kind of attention, which he hadn’t realized he was so thirsty for, he was helpless. He tried to pull away, but he felt like a car that wouldn’t start, no matter how many times he tried the engine.

“Have I ever told you,” Pete asked, kissing the vibration of the hum rapidly devolving into whimper. “Have I ever told you that I keep a playlist of your appearances? Even when we’re apart, I still fall asleep next to the sound of your voice.”

Jesus Christ. “Why are you doing this? Do you think dismembering Tulsi onstage wasn’t turn-on enough?”

Pete shifted just slightly, tip of his nose dragging along his jawline. Now there was mint breath soft against his temple. “Your voice is always in my ear, even when I can’t hear it. Do you understand?”

He was close to hyperventilating, and he’d hardly been touched. “I surrender; I fucking surrender; you win; I’ll do anything; just take me.”

Pete stopped kissing his hairline. “You’re a human being, not a thing. Nobody can take you.”

Chasten’s pounding heart filled with a frightened hungry greed as he felt one of those elegant hands drifting up the exterior of his arm. Human being; thing; at the moment, the hairs on the back of his arms didn’t care to argue what he was.

“You’ve been telling people lately that I leave poems under your pillow.”

He felt electrocuted, newly combustible, all over again. “People love that story,” he somehow found the self-control to say. The fingers just barely traced the outline of his shoulder, then came to rest on the warmth of his hot face. “_Women_ love that story.” He felt immobilized but, with great effort, he tremblingly turned his head to kiss his husband’s palm, his inner wrist, his blue vein, the watch he still hadn’t taken off - oh, God, _the watch,_ and the real story behind it, that no one else in the world but them knew. Pete’s barely-there shiver of a response was intoxicating. When Pete spoke again, Chasten had difficulty remembering what they’d been discussing.

“It’s a brilliant story,” Pete said. “But it makes me feel guilty. I never meant to stop writing poetry for you.”

“So you haven’t done it for a few years. It’s the whitest of lies.” A kiss on vein and pulse, so close to blood. “It’s a lie that tells the truth.”

“But I never want you to have to lie any more than you have to. This sonnet is so you don’t have to.”

Chasten stopped kissing. They laid for a moment in silence. Finally he turned his head toward Pete’s, aching with wonder. “Peter,” he whispered. “Can you do me a favor?” He reached over and his hands began running through Pete’s hair. They moved of their own accord, by sheer uncontrollable instinct.

“Anything.”

Chasten rolled over on top of him. They both laughed the same half-laugh. But then the laughs faded, and he didn’t know whether what he was about to say was banter or not. “Go back to my teenage self,” Chasten finally whispered. “Find him. Tell him you were waiting. Everything would have been so different.”

Pete looked away. It wasn’t banter. “As long as you go back to tell me, too,” he finally said.

Their shared regret was an aphrodisiac. Chasten kissed him. “Never, ever…” Chasten kissed him again. Their lips were beginning to soften. “In my wildest, wildest dreams…”

“Me neither,” Pete whispered, and the three incoherent phrases held worlds.

The intensity of this intimacy suddenly became too much, and so Chasten laid his head down on his husband’s chest to catch his breath. He felt hands take away his glasses, then soft fingers threading through his hair, leaving electric tingles in their wake.

Chasten knew, somehow, that the next question was coming.

“When you called me the other night…” Pete said. He curved his fingers just slightly, so the nails lightly scratched Chasten’s scalp, triggering a small, involuntary arch of his spine. “What were you dreaming about?”

“What - do you mean?” Chasten asked, shaky, his glitching brain trying to buy time.

“The phone call the other night. It had to have been a dream.” Pete hesitated. “Or a nightmare.”

“Yes,” Chasten said. It was the only response he could think of.

Pete’s fingers tilted just slightly, so the scratch disappeared, and there were only soft pads instead. “What happened in it?”

Chasten took a breath. The familiar scent of the bunched-up shirt and the calming heartbeat under his ear and the careful fingers in his hair was having an autonomic effect. He suddenly realized that Pete had almost certainly planned this entire seduction solely for the extraction of this information. He knew he should feel manipulated, but the fact that Peter had spent so much time learning how to play him, and could do it so effortlessly and at will, somehow left him with nothing but respect.

“You’d won,” Chasten finally said.

“Iowa?”

“Everything.”

The fingers in his hair froze for a split second, then continued.

Chasten closed his eyes. The scent and the touch became even more transporting. His body believed the two of them were home safe and alone and together again, that the dogs were downstairs, that if he stepped outside the bedroom door the staircase steps would creak in all the places they both had memorized. “It was the day before our fourth wedding anniversary. We had a daughter.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete whispered.

Chasten hadn’t meant to induce guilt. “It’s okay,” he whispered back, glancing up at his chin then burying back again. “She was beautiful.”

“I’m sure she was.”

“We named her Jennifer.”

Chasten felt tendons in his husband’s throat just barely move; he could tell he was smiling at the idea. “Did you mention that to Mom? She’d get a kick out of a namesake.”

Chasten didn’t answer for a moment. Hand trembling, he reached out down Pete’s free arm until he found his fingers, and he laced them together with his. “I didn’t,” he finally said, voice shaky. “Because I was a fucking disaster of a father.”

Pete’s laughter was incredulous, and it rolled from deep beneath him. “You? How?”

Chasten kept his eyes closed, tilted his head further into Pete, as if he mumbled words into his chest they wouldn’t escape into the air. “She wanted to touch the portraits on the walls. I kept yanking at her arm. She wanted to climb up on the bust in the Oval Office. I had to pull her away. I swore at her. I begged her to pretend she was a statue, just to get her to be quiet, but all she did was scream.” He could feel Pete tensing just slightly beneath him as he talked. He was tensing himself. He closed his eyes even tighter. “Then Lis was there…”

The tension turned to exasperation. “Oh, God. Press secretary?”

“Communications director.”

“So we hired her to yell at reporters off-camera instead of on?”

Chasten felt a ghost of a smile pass over his face. “Something like that. So Lis asked me to step away to strategize, and she used her shoes to distract Jennifer. Jennifer put them on and was going to fall down and I…” Chasten started feeling wet cotton beneath his cheek. He tried blinking the tears away. He hoped Pete couldn’t feel them. He understood that it made no sense to cry over a dream. “I remember wishing that she’d fall and break her neck.”

This time the hand in his hair stopped moving for good, and Chasten didn’t blame him. Instead the fingers just held the back of his neck. “Why were you strategizing?” he finally asked.

Chasten had trouble finding words. In the familiar close-eyed warmth he felt as if he was slipping into a kind of twilight sleep, a place where the differences between reality, dreams, and retelling of stories were all pointless to parse, because they were all true. “We were losing the House,” he finally brought himself to murmur. “Which I knew meant you’d be impeached. Klobuchar was AG and mangling the Trump prosecution.”

He was woken up again a little by Pete’s sigh. He slowly began squeezing his husband’s hand, maybe too tightly.

“And…” Chasten’s voice cracked.

“What?” The soothing fingers in the hair returned. Pete was just too masterful at this. It wasn’t fair.

“Anne had just died,” he said.

The fingers pressed in deeper, ground into his scalp. A millimeter more and he would have felt pain. “Oh.”

Excess irritation at the husband from his dream suddenly animated him a little. “And you couldn’t - or wouldn’t - take five minutes from your schedule to help plan the funeral. It was sociopathic. Your own parent’s death didn’t change your ambitions a single iota. You just sailed on, not even - ”

Chasten was so hypnotized that, thirty words too late, he realized Pete’s entire body had gone stiff beneath him. He suddenly woke up completely, and propped himself up on his elbows in horror, looking with wide eyes down. There was a terrified expression on his husband's face that Chasten had never seen before.

“Shit,” Chasten said, quickly. “I didn’t - ” His voice sounded obnoxiously, suddenly loud. He tried to make it quieter, as insistent and believable as possible. He was afraid he came across as desperate. “That was _not_ a reference to your father; I didn’t mean to imply - you’re not - ”

Pete sank into a whisper. “I can’t help… I pack feelings away.”

Chasten wished he had a way of hurting himself that wouldn’t also hurt Pete. He could think of none. So instead, he rolled over onto his back and pulled Pete onto him. Pete didn’t protest. “Jennifer loved you so much,” he offered dumbly, as if the love of a fictional daughter would make up for the loss of a real father, a loss that had been so conspicuously compartmentalized, tightly packed away in a box labeled To Be Grieved Later. “Your daughter loved you best. Because you are _so fundamentally lovable_.”

Pete’s voice came muffled and sullen from his chest. “Well, that would have been my first tipoff that it was all a dream.”

“Sssshhhh.” Chasten traced his fingers back and forth across Pete’s forehead. “You will be a marvelous father. Do you really think I’d marry a man who wouldn’t be?”

Pete laid there beneath the caresses and reassurance for a long while, and Chasten wondered if they might fall asleep like that. He wouldn’t regret it if they did. But then Pete rolled over and sat up, sheets whispering as they moved.

“Chasten,” he said.

“What?”

“Jennifer is you.” A pause. “If you subscribe to Jungian theory.”

Chasten blinked up at him, hand still displaced from Pete moving out from underneath it. He half-chuckled helplessly that his husband’s subconscious was mulling Jungian theory against its will. “What?”

“The inner child,” Pete said. “She’s the vulnerable part of you that’s been suppressed. Abandoned. That needs someone to take care of her.”

Chasten stared up. Pete started talking faster.

“She doesn’t understand why you’re dragging her through the White House. She wants to touch the history on the walls, but you don’t think she’s qualified to. She’s tired of pretending to be a statue who has to hide all her feelings and pretend to be happy and cheerful and positive all the time. She wants to walk in Lis’s shoes, and the ambitious side of you wouldn’t mind if she dies doing it.”

Chasten froze. He lost breath. He felt humiliatingly exposed and unspeakably ashamed.

“You hating that little girl doesn’t mean you’ll hate our daughter. You hating her means you hate yourself.”

They looked at each other. In between heartbeats, Chasten noticed that somehow their fingers were still intertwined.

“I’m so sorry,” Pete breathed. Suddenly he was leaning down, kissing Chasten’s face, his cheekbones, his ears, his chin, his lips, hoarse, wildly desperate scraps of phrases escaping him. “I’m sorry - I swear to God I’m not a sociopath - doing all this - I never ever - not in a thousand years ever meant to hurt - I care - I care _so fucking deeply_ \- too deeply - I just don’t know how - I don’t know how to - really feel _ anything _\- or express how deeply - I’ve hidden - so much, for so long; you don’t - ”

Again, dizziness, exacerbated by the strange sight of his husband's incoherence, but Chasten caught himself from falling into it. He grabbed Pete by the upper arms and squeezed them as hard as he could, as if his fingers could somehow press sense into his muscles. “Stop. Stop it. And never, ever be sorry,” he said.

“How can I not be sorry? I’m making you destroy yourself. I’m making you destroy yourself because I’m a calculating egomaniacal monster.”

They stared at each other, breathing heavy.

“We’re _ both _calculating egomaniacal monsters,” Chasten finally said. “How else would we have met? And you can’t be sorry for our meeting, can you?” His eyes darted across Pete’s teary face. He hadn’t seen him cry like this since after they got home from their wedding: not even at his own father’s memorial. He held his face in the desperately unrealistic hope that his palms could soak up tears. “I’m not even sure the dream was real,” he offered. “Lis gave me a pill. Maybe it was all just some drug-induced hallucination; I don’t know.”

Pete blinked at him. “What?”

“It was the night of the Holocaust memorial picture.”

“Why did Lis give you a pill?”

“To help me sleep.”

Pete bit his lip. “White and small and oblong?” he asked. His voice sounded very tired.

“She gave you one, too?”

“Well.” He moved Chasten’s hands and wiped away the last of the tears himself. “Let’s just say I know who gives them to her.”

Chasten suddenly felt weak. “It’s not - ?”

“No,” he sighed with finality, “it’s not me,” and it was clear he would be saying nothing more on that subject, so Chasten let it slide.

Pete laid down again. They both laid there together, looking at the mass-produced modern hotel art and the blank white ceiling. Without saying a word, Chasten finally, glumly, leaned over to turn off the light. Highlights of the debate were still playing on the muted television. The closed captioning lagged thirty seconds late, making it impossible to follow.

Pete was the one to finally break the silence as he watched himself on the screen. “Why the hell are we doing this to ourselves?”

“Well, it’s obviously not _for_ ourselves,” Chasten said.

“Any one of those people onstage tonight would be a better president than Trump. A couple of them might even be good.”

Chasten watched. The camera panned over the candidates onstage. When he replied, his voice was very flat. Resigned. “Because if they can’t win, they’ll never have the chance to be good presidents. And every single one of those candidates is fatally flawed for the general.”

“Honestly? I think I am, too.”

“Not if we get lucky and play our cards right.” Chasten turned on his side to study Pete’s face. He watched the reflections of the television light playing against his features. “And we’ve gotten lucky, and we’ve played our cards pretty damn right so far.” He paused, considering. “A hell of a lot better than they have, anyway.”

Pete smiled, but it was a scared smile, and he didn’t seem convinced.

Chasten sighed. He began to whisper. “Three years ago a dragon flew by, Peter, and he set the world on fucking fire. And maybe...you’re the only person who can put the fire out. Because you are a fucking marvel.” He reached down for the poem resting between them and held it up like a lawyer showing off an exhibit in court.

Pete rejected the evidence. “I should have waited, like we’d planned. We should have had more time. A stronger foundation. I should at least have given you the courtesy of that.”

Chasten was surprised at how firm he sounded, and even more surprised by how firm he felt. “Moving fast was my idea,” he said. “If there’s ever a dragon to be slayed in this world... I’m not standing in the way of the knight who’s going to do it.”

Pete’s half-smile at the metaphor was encouraging.

“This isn’t about us anymore. This is about using our fucked-up selves to serve our country. To _save_ our country. I will do everything within my power to get you into that office. Because the country deserves it. Because no matter what tricks my brain tries to pull on me, I know in my heart that you have everything it takes.” He hesitated. “And as long as you love me, I’ll have everything, too.”

“That’s the truth?”

“That’s the truth.”

Pete glanced over at him appreciatively. Chasten leaned over, and somehow the glance turned into a kiss, and then, despite the late hour, something more.

* * *

Chasten was still awake two hours later. He’d made the mistake of mumbling small talk in the post-sex haze: invariably the time when Pete’s defenses were at their lowest, and always a welcome glance into the locked-away oceans roiling inside of him.

“Do _you_ ever have nightmares?” Chasten had murmured as he drifted.

Pete too was half asleep. “All the time.”

The answer had woken Chasten up immediately. He’d drawn himself up, horrified. “You shouldn’t keep nightmares to yourself.”

It took Pete a minute to answer. He was slipping away. “Oh, darling,” he’d said, voice hoarse. “A President has to keep lots of nightmares to himself. I need to know what it’s like.”

* * *

Toward the edge of dawn, Chasten gave up on sleeping and picked up his phone and texted Lis.

_ Why did Amy fall for our bullshit again? _

He wasn’t sure if Lis would be awake to answer, but he should have known better.

_ She didn’t entirely _

_ That was just a slap. She could have punched. _

_ You’re a paranoiac _

_ Do you ever sleep? _

_ Do you? _

_ Hope the sex was good _

_ He deserved to be treated right _

That was enough of that conversation. He opened Instagram. He checked his DMs, and looked at the last one he’d sent to Rosario Dawson. “Rosario!!!!! Great debate!” Her answer: “You’re welcome” with a wink emoji.

Then, with trepidation, for the thousandth time that day, he closed his eyes to remember the meeting he’d had hours ago in this very room, while Pete had been prepping in the hotel lobby below.

“Kamala is the only one capable of truly destroying him tonight,” he’d told Douglas Emhoff. “If she goes easy on him, I’ll tell Pete to get her whatever she wants. I’m very good at convincing him. He trusts my judgment, and he’ll do anything to make me happy.”

“And if this conversation is any indication, you’ll do anything to make _him_ happy,” Doug had said.

Chasten had nodded. His voice had trembled. Neither the nod nor the tremble had been an act. “Savage him tomorrow,” he said. “But just - spare him tonight.”

And with that, with a look of wistful understanding and maybe even pity, Doug had reached out his hand, and they had shaken on it.

* * *

_You're ready._ \- [Chasten Buttigieg, Twitter, November 20, 2019](https://twitter.com/Chas10Buttigieg/status/1197231194288640000)


	15. Mid-August 2015: South Bend, Indiana

August 18, 2015

“So,” he found himself asking. “What are your thoughts on politics?”

Pete didn’t know much about love, but he understood enough to know that the man Facetiming him was conventionally attractive. His hair swooped into a widow’s peak and he wore a wholesomely Midwestern gingham shirt.

“Ugh,” he said, eyes rolling. “I’m so sick of the mudslinging.”

For the first time that week, Pete felt a stirring of interest. “Me, too,” he said. His heart rose, beating a little faster. “The division and the partisanship and the - ”

He was interrupted. “Guess what president I’ve always had a crush on.”

Pete laughed in an attempt to convince himself that he didn’t mind being interrupted. “JFK?” he asked, crossing his fingers.

“Close! Woodrow Wilson.” An awkward pause. “Is that weird?”

_ “No.” And his name was crossed off the list. _

August 19, 2015

“So,” he found himself asking. “What are your thoughts on politics?”

The man in his phone had a round face and a friendly, outgoing disposition. Pete had immediately relaxed into the couch cushions as soon as he’d begun to speak. He tried remembering every detail of the moment: the angle of the sun outside, the hum and the rattle of the air conditioning. _This is where my love story starts,_ he told himself.

“I went to the White House once when I was a kid,” the man offered.

Pete stopped breathing. It was kismet. “Really?” He waited for what felt like an eternity, but was only the length of three heartbeats. He was proud of how casual he made his next question sound. “What did you think?”

The man’s gaze grew distant. “Or...maybe it was the Capitol. It was one of the white buildings.”

_ “No.” And his name was crossed off the list. _

August 20, 2015

“So,” he found himself asking. “What are your thoughts on politics?”

Even over the phone, Pete could tell that his potential date’s eyes were almost periwinkle. Pete decided that, provided there was a brain behind them, he’d be happy to fall and drown inside them.

“I vote,” the man offered.

Encouraged, Pete sat upright. “Who’s your favorite in the primary?” he asked.

The periwinkle eyes blinked at him. “What’s a primary?”

_ “No.” And his name was crossed off the list. _

August 21, 2015

“So,” he found himself asking. “What are your thoughts on politics?”

The man in his phone had black hair and a black beard, and despite the heat, was wearing a black scarf that fluttered dramatically behind him as he walked. He strode down the dazzling Chicago streets, honeyed voice garbled by the gush of Michigan Avenue traffic. There was something feral in the way he glanced defensively from side to side, wary of sights that Pete, trapped in his hand, could not see himself.

“Oh, I have a lot of thoughts - ” the man finally offered.

“I’d love to hear them.”

“- Starting with the neoliberal corporate shills at the DNC - ”

_ “No.” And his name was crossed off the list. _

August 22, 2015

“So,” he found himself asking. “What are your thoughts on politics?”

The man’s laugh was decorated by a smile and a blue-eyed sparkle. He leaned forward to answer in a stage whisper. “Politics, Peter, is the best theater game,” he said, as if he was sharing a secret with the only other person on earth.

That was the moment that Pete realized how the pictures had somehow missed everything important about Chasten Glezman. How, once you saw his face in motion, it was clear that that the tiny creases in the corners of his eyes were born of wit, not worry. How his smooth voice married sophistication with silliness. How his round glasses lent a bookish charm, and, how, when his head was tilted just so, they framed his light blue pupils. How his skin looked so soft and fresh and new; how his neck clearly smelled of just-washed gingham laundry hung out to dry in the summer sun.

“Theater game?” Pete finally asked, repeating the last phrase he remembered hearing.

“Absolutely. It’s a game that nobody understands they’re playing. And that’s the best kind of game.”

“So you’re interested in politics, then?” _Please_, Pete found himself silently, involuntarily begging. _Please_.

“Let’s just say that I taped all the nominating conventions as I grew up.”

His heart began hammering, crazed to escape his ribs to meet this man. “Who was your first?”

A coy smile.

“Convention nominee,” Pete said hurriedly. “I meant convention nominee.” He saw his face redden in the tiny inset rectangle on-screen, so he focused all the harder on the man’s eyes.

“Well, the first I remember clearly is George W. Bush.”

“Oh.” Shit. That was the summer he'd left for college. He suddenly regretted this line of questioning. He might as well have sat down with a cane and a bran muffin.

Chasten plowed through his discomfort, aiming straight for the center of it. “Who was  _ your  _ first” - a gently mocking pause - “convention nominee?”

“My parents made me watch both ‘88 conventions, so George H. W. Bush. And Dukakis.” He glanced at his lap, embarrassed. “I’m an old man,” he mumbled in apology.

“Not old,” Chasten returned cheerfully. “Just nerdy. And very, very smart.”

The praise, simultaneously tossed-off and utterly sincere, made Pete feel as if someone had just lightly run a finger down the entire length of his spine. He noticed, as if from a great distance, that his thoughts were growing cloudier. He tried to keep the stammering to a minimum. “You - you say you ‘used to’ be interested in politics? Did you lose interest, or - ?” Again, involuntarily: _please, God._

Some of the good nature seeped out of Chasten’s expression, replaced by just a tinge of bitterness. He used a tone that sounded like it belonged to a much older, cynical man. “Well, I didn’t lose interest, per se. For a long time I actually thought I’d be going into politics. But then - ” He shrugged. “I started kissing boys.”

“Oh,” Pete said, and he heard so much in his own voice in that one syllable.  _ Oh _ .

Chasten worked to paper over the sudden pessimism. “It is what it is. I’ve convinced myself that I was less interested in politics than I was in the performance of politics, anyway.”

“Is that true?”

A brief resigned smile. “Well, I’ve already signed the grad school loans, so it has to be true, right?”

“I suppose so.”

Chasten sighed. “That all sounded dark and ungrateful. I didn’t mean it to. I love theater. I love teaching theater. I love working with kids. And I’ll do a lot of good in my career. I’m sure of it.”

Pete had a sudden yearning to douse this man and set him aflame with encouragement. “I’m positive you will,” he said, with fevered devotion, as if he knew him. “Teachers are the best. My parents are professors. And teachers make,” he said, incongruously and without thinking, “the best parents.” For a brief, bizarrely vivid moment he slipped into another timeline, a lazy Sunday morning in his too-big bed too big no more, imagining this man with mussed hair and a book in hand, his - their - daughter and son under each arm, acting out every voice of every character and making his - their - bedroom ring with shrieks of laughter.

“That’s sweet,” Chasten said, smilingly oblivious to the fantasy. “But still. Politics is the one that got away, you know? We all have that first love that never worked out.”

“I - ” Pete said. “Yeah.” He cleared his throat, hoping to clear his mind. “So...politics as a theater game. Tell me more about that metaphor. How does one play? How should it be played?”

Another smile. “That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Everyone goes about it differently. Some are better at it than others. My theory is, you look at your story. You take your entire message out of that story. Then you link that story and that message to everything that’s showy and on the surface, from slogans to social media strategy to tie color to you name it.”

Here, finally, was the bullshit. “Tie color?”

The smile grew broader at his skepticism. “Oh, you’d be surprised at how long I can discourse on the symbolism behind tie color.” He leaned forward, scrutinizing. Pete felt a wave of flattered fear, not exactly sure what on him was being looked at. Finally he leaned back again. “If I could just button you up in a crisp white shirt...and roll up the sleeves...and choose a tie...” He paused for longer than he needed to. “I could do a lot with the imagery of that.”

Pete tried desperately to ignore the idea of soft kind confident fingers buttoning dress shirt buttons, trailing up his torso. “I - I - so you analyze campaign slogans,” he asked in a burst that he was afraid was sounding unhinged, “or - ?”

“That, and I can come up with them myself.” He shrugged dismissively. “It’s nothing more than a party trick that nobody wants to watch, really.”

Pete’s ego suddenly pushed to the forefront of his thoughts to make a demand. “What slogan would you write for me?”

“Smart, hot, respectful,” Chasten said immediately, and Pete became disoriented, because either this slogan had been conceived at inhuman warp speed, or already, for some reason, he had it prepared. He must have betrayed his shock because Chasten started laughing. “Really, though,” he said, “it should depend on who you’re running against. Give me a hypothetical match-up to play with.”

Pete’s mind drifted back to the publication of his coming-out editorial two months ago. He remembered watching a campaign launch speech immediately before getting blackout drunk. He hesitated, but finally decided to enter a dark alternate reality. It would be as good a test of the man’s skills as any. “Hypothetically,” he said. “What if Trump won?”

“Well, fuck. The nomination or the presidency?”

“The presidency.”

“Well, double fuck.”

“Indeed. And…” Pete hesitated, suddenly not sure: not sure of anything. He continued very carefully. “...Say I ran against him in 2020. What slogan would you pitch?”

He waited for the laugh. But there was none. In fact, Chasten’s expression had grown abstracted. He was treating the idea seriously. “Give me a minute. I have to think about the candidates.”

“Candidates? It’s just Trump.”

Chasten turned impatient. “Oh, but it isn’t. You have to think longer-term. You want to keep consistent messaging from the primary into the general. So I’m thinking of who might all be in the 2020 primary.”

“Oh.”

A good sixty seconds passed, but Pete, to his surprise, found the intense silence companionable and electric, and not at all awkward. He almost expected Chasten to start whirring and clicking like an Enigma machine.

Finally: “I can think of a few. But off the top of my head, I like ‘win the era.’”

Pete stared.

Chasten bit his lip, not sure how to take this reaction. “Do you like it?”

“I do.” And then, as it sank in: “ _ I do _ . But how - ?”

Pete felt relieved that, for the first time in the conversation, Chasten seemed to be embarrassed. “If I bother explaining,” he said, “I will instantly become ninety percent less attractive.”

“Not to me.” Pete had said the words before he could think them.

Chasten tilted his head just slightly and smiled. He watched him for a moment, curious. “Hmm,” he said. “Well. In that case, here goes. Pour a drink. You’d be the youngest president ever, right?”

“Yes.”

“So that’s a very interesting race to message. Your youth - or inexperience, depending on perspective - would be both your primary strength and your primary weakness, right? Because Trump would be the _oldest_ president ever elected. So the dynamic would become an even more extreme version of the one between Obama/McCain in ‘08. Democrats, of course, have done well historically when they’ve nominated a youthful outsider - Obama, Clinton, Carter, JFK. Theoretically you could fill the same role. That is, of course, assuming that your storytelling strategy is executed by talented hands. And since my hands would be the ones executing it, you’d have very talented hands attending you by default.”

Pete swallowed at the suggestiveness.

“Now. There are exceptions, but the most memorable slogans are generally three words. Hope and change. Yes we can. Sí, se puede. Stay the course. Drill, baby, drill. Remember Pearl Harbor; remember the Maine; remember the Alamo. Give me liberty; give me death. Six words there, but you get the idea; it’s two threes in one. So. What you’re looking for in a 2020 matchup against Donald Trump is a three-word slogan.”

Pete reached out for the pen on the coffee table. He had no idea why, but he felt compelled to take notes.

“It’s good to start with a verb; that suggests action and movement, which tracks with the general impression of youth and vigor that you’re aiming to impart. I like the word ‘win’ here because it subconsciously calls to mind Democrats’ past victories with young outsider candidates. But win what? I’m trying to imagine the potential field on our side. Biden. Sanders, obviously. Warren. A few new folks might come up in the 2016 cycle, but we’ll leave them aside for a moment. So what do Sanders, Biden, and Warren all have in common?”

He knew the answer to this one. “They’ve all served in the Senate.”

“You’re being too smart. They’re old. Another point for your youth strategy, by the way. As long as those three are your main threats, you’ll want to continue to emphasize the age gap. Then you’ll be able to stretch that theme into the general, which will lend cohesiveness and authenticity to your message. After four years of Trump, liberals will be screaming Hitler, and probably rightfully so. He’s shattering campaign norms on the trail; he wouldn’t stop in office. I envision three potential responses from Democrats. One, a return to normalcy. Second, a revolution of our own. Or third, an appetite for an anti-Trump from a new generation. Did you know that Bush, Clinton, and Trump were all born in the summer of 1945? They’re all from another era. You, on the other hand, are from a very new one. In fact, you’re the only one of the four who will actually be alive to witness the era you’re asking to launch. That’s powerful. Therefore: Win The Era. You’re welcome.”

Pete had dropped his pen. He could do nothing but stare.

Chasten laughed, clearly exhilarated by the exercise. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a political monologue like that without someone dying of acute boredom. You, Peter, are the first documented survivor. Congratulations." His face was bright with pleasure.

“Would you ever want to talk this over in-person?” Pete said. Then, with a hoarse voice, he jumped off a cliff. “On a date?”

Chasten smiled.

* * *

“No.” And his name was crossed off the list.

By Mike Schmuhl, who was holding a pen and a spreadsheet. He was sitting on the couch opposite Pete. That week, as Pete had recovered from minor surgery, Mike had cooked, cleaned, and listened to every single word of every single call between his old friend and two dozen Chicago men. Mike himself had been the one to message them, posing as Pete, then, after they'd passed his preliminary inspection, the one to research them further, and, finally, the one to schedule the calls with the real man. An entire banker’s box of their biographies rested at his feet.

Pete felt his giddy smile start to dissolve. “What?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you didn’t like him.”

“Actually, I liked him quite a bit.”

Mike sighed. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if it wanted to be exasperated, but could only find it within itself to be soft and pitying instead. “You didn’t like him as a person, Pete. You liked him as a thing to use.”

“What?”

“That,” Mike said, gesturing toward the phone, “was not a husband. That was a campaign manager. Do you want to fuck a campaign manager? If you've wanted to fuck a campaign manager, I’ve been here since high school. Have at me.”

“That would be a terrible idea.”

“That’s what I’m saying! Rule number one: no fucking between campaign staff.”

Pete ignored him. “But when you were messaging with him, what did you think? Do you think he liked you? And by you, I mean me?” He was suddenly flooded by doubts. “God, this was a terrible idea. You can’t imitate me. Why didn’t you tell me that was a terrible idea?”

“Because it wasn’t a terrible idea. I had time to browse and I know what you need. I sorted the wheat from the chaff.”

A bitter laugh. “Oh, like the wheat who didn’t know what a primary was?”

Mike became defensive. “There’s something to be said for an attractive husband who has no idea what we’re doing. He’d sell magazine covers. Increase your numbers with women, probably.”

Pete couldn’t argue with that, as much as he wanted to. He tried to imagine fresh-faced small-town Chasten on the cover of Vogue or People or Time. He didn’t know, honestly, if he could pull it off. He wondered if he could be taught. “Where’s Chasten’s file?” he asked.

Mike poked around the box at his feet and withdrew a manila folder. He glanced at the first page before sliding it over the coffee table. “In my notes I wrote ‘smartass.’”

Pete’s eyes skimmed the page. “But you wrote ‘nice eyes’ first.”

“Followed by ‘smartass.’”

Before the call, Pete had skimmed through the transcript of the messages that Mike had exchanged with Chasten. He wasn't dumb enough to go into these conversations completely blind. But now he started again from the beginning, wanting to do a close reading of the implications of every single syllable Mike had deigned to type. He felt a sudden pang of jealousy, that Mike had stolen his first message to this man. He'd never have a chance to make an honest first impression again. But the pang made no sense; he’d been the one to approve the theft. If it had been a mistake, it was his own to admit.

He'd been reading a while, cringing at Mike's occasional typo or imprecise phraseology, when Mike gently pried the folder out of his hands. “I think I should take this,” he said. “This isn’t high school. This is high stakes. Now is the absolute worst possible time for you to lose control. If you lose control now, the control of the last twenty years has meant nothing.”

“I’m not losing control,” Pete said, realizing that he was losing control.

“Quiet,” Mike said, stepping around the coffee table and sitting back down on the couch again. “Let's be calm and rational. There are serious downsides here. He’s a theater teacher. Yes, we wanted a teacher, which is why I thought he might work, but… I wasn't aware of the extent of the political interest. I find that alarming.”

“He’s an actor. He could help sell a story.”

“Sure, but would he sell your story? We need undying loyalty. He’d always have to put himself second. You’d be re-crushing his secret ambition every single day of your lives together. Is that fair to ask?” He paused, a new, even more dire outcome clearly occurring to him. "God, what if he starts overshadowing you? You're so goddamned stiff in front of cameras; it wouldn't be hard."

“But imagine the upsides,” Pete said, a little desperately. “He’d be great on the stump - great with interviews and attention… He’d be wonderful with kids…”

Mike twitched. "You're imagining him as the father of your _kids?_"

“I meant kids on the trail."

“Also,” Mike said, cutting off that line of thought, “he has an evangelical brother.”

“That’s not necessarily bad. There could be a reunion narrative.”

“Also, I found a Grindr profile.”

Pete felt a flare of inadequacy. He tamped it down. “That’s not disqualifying in this day and age, is it?”

“Also, he’s from Michigan.”

“Why is that a downside?”

“Because it’s so solidly Democratic. There are more useful swing states to choose mates from. Florida. North Carolina. Arizona. Texas, even.”

“No harm in a firewall.”

“Also, he’s white. He’s so very, very white.”

“Mike.”

“Also, his education is spotty. Compared to ours. Community college in Michigan, then the University of Wisconsin. He just enrolled at DePaul for his master’s.”

“He’s smart. Scrappy. Resourceful.”

“He’s indecisive. Impulsive. And probably up to his eyeballs in debt, with no hope of paying it back.”

“That wouldn’t be an issue until we got married.”

Mike fell silent for a moment. He closed the folder and put it away. “You want to fuck this guy, don’t you?”

A flush of shame blossomed on the back of Pete's neck. “I - ” he said. “Fuck is a very strong word.”

Mike clasped his hands together and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I wouldn’t be asking you this if it wasn’t, albeit in a very roundabout way, a campaign issue, but…” He kept his eyes on the bookcase, avoiding eye contact. “Have you ever let yourself actually imagine…” He hesitated. Pete felt the flush spread. “...Yourself with a man?” and Mike said the words so quickly they seemed to melt together into one.

“Jesus Christ,” was the only thing Pete could bring himself to say.

“Are you really…” Another agonizingly awkward pause. “..._Interested in him,_ or are you just interested in his ideas? Because you should know the difference before you start dating. You can’t fuck a conversation.”

“Mike.” He tried to sound curt, but the sudden swirls of uncertainty made it impossible.

“Let me be more delicate, then. Say you get a beer at Fiddler’s. He gets warm and he undoes the top button of his shirt. Do you get distracted?”

To Pete’s relief, logic took over. “Of course not; it’s just a neck; we all have necks.”

“What if you’re out walking along the river with him and you fall behind? Do you check him out?”

To Pete’s relief, duty took over. “I'd never perv where a constituent might see.”

“What if he was in your bed on a rainy day, and he rolled over, and he gazed into your eyes, and he asked you to recite a Kennedy speech? Would you want to touch him then?”

To Pete’s horror, weakness took over. He fought it with every ounce of self-discipline he possessed, but rational thought fell victim in the battle, and to his humiliation, his silence betrayed everything.

“Christ, Pete,” Mike muttered. “You were weird enough as it was.”

He suddenly felt anger. Anger at himself for being so unusual. Anger at Mike for judging. Anger at the world for breaking him, almost certainly beyond repair. “What the fuck am I supposed to say?” he demanded. “_‘Sorry I need someone to care about what I care about before I want them’? ‘Sorry the career I love never let me be gay’? ‘Sorry that this closet door is jammed after twenty years and it’s a fucking heavy door and my oldest friend isn't exactly helping me open it’?_ What do you want me to goddamn fucking say, Mike? What do you want me to goddamn fucking say?”

Mike sat back. He looked sullen. He also didn’t argue.

“I am who I am,” Pete finally said. “I’ll love who I’ll love, how I’ll love him. I’ll fuck who I’ll fuck. I don’t see the world like you. I never have. I never will. I can’t. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Mike took a long while to absorb the words. As he did, he straightened out the file folders that were already straightened out. “It’s so strange seeing you like this.”

This did nothing to soothe Pete’s irritation. “Yeah, well, it’s pretty fucking awkward for me, too.” He looked away, out the window at the warm lush August afternoon. To his despair, the flush of shame didn't subside. The ebullient optimism he'd felt during the call had completely evaporated, leaving nothing behind but a dull, achy misery.

After a few minutes, he heard the sound of a folder being slid across the coffee table. He looked back. Mike still had his fingertips on the manila, but then he took a deep breath and let go. “If you’re really _that_ intrigued…” Mike said, but he didn’t finish the sentence. “There’s nothing that says you can’t learn from him.” Then, under his breath: “Sounds like there’s a lot to learn.”

He shot a glance that he intended to be angry, but which ended up just grateful. He snatched the folder.

Mike grew thoughtful. “Maybe,” he said, “starting out with someone like him is an advantage. Use him to learn the ropes while I keep searching. Then when someone better-suited shows up… We can reconvene.”

Pete tucked the folder between the couch cushions. He felt strangely protective of it. “Could you sound any more sinister if you tried?”

“I’m just thinking out loud.”

“I’m not looking for a mail-order groom.”

“Sure you aren’t.”

“I just don’t want to drag someone into our lives unless they’re prepared for our lives. Unless they _want_ our lives.” He hit a note of regret. “I’m never blindsiding a remarkable person with our ambition again.”

“I know. We’ve been over all that.” Mike’s voice was weary. “Well. Go ahead. Enjoy him. Just - be kind, okay? Listen to him. Take care of him. Treasure him. Write him love poems. Be gentle with him, unless he wants - ”

“Don’t finish that sentence.”

“Make him adore you, so you break up on good terms. Let him think he's not worthy of you, that it was all his fault, so he doesn't fight back. Because the last thing we need is a charismatic actor ex who knows all your secrets and is hellbent on vengeance.”

Pete felt a revulsion. “Do we really have to plan my first gay date and my first gay breakup simultaneously?”

“Yes,” Mike said with an unnerving conviction that Pete had to take seriously. “Because nobody finds their soulmate after eight weeks of looking. He will be, at best, your first boyfriend. He is not a smart choice for a governor’s husband. And he is definitely not the best choice for First Gentleman of the United States. But that’s okay. We can find a man who is. We have time.”

Pete ran a hand through his hair. He wanted to scream and he didn’t understand why. “Can you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Anything. Always.”

“Stop thinking about the plan. Just let me have one normal date. One human experience. One night of my life when I’m not climbing a ladder. Okay?”

Mike regarded him. There was unease in his expression. “That’s the first time you’ve ever asked me to stop thinking about the plan.”

“Well, good,” Pete said. There was a false cheer to his voice. “I should only have a job in politics if I can walk away from it, so… Good. This is progress. I’m making progress, Mike.”

“If you say so,” Mike said, dubious.

An awkward silence passed.

“Just…” Mike finally said. He hesitated. “Don’t ever think you need to settle, Pete. You've never believed it, but you deserve the best. You always have. You always will.”

The devotion triggered a reluctant quarter-smile.

“I’ll heat that microwave dinner for you before I go.”

“I can do it,” Pete said. He struggled up, then winced.

“No,” Mike said, touching his shoulder. “Don’t. I’ve got it.”

He disappeared into the kitchen for a while. Pete felt uncomfortable hearing drawers and cabinets opening and closing in the distance, one after the other after the other, because Mike clearly had no idea where he kept anything. He started and stopped the microwave three times. It sounded like he had a burglar for a caterer.

Finally he emerged, carrying an oversized cutting board, employing it as a tray. On it was a soggy microwave dinner and a jaggedly cut fruit salad.

“Oh,” Pete said. “You didn’t need to make a fruit salad.”

“I know,” Mike said. “You still like cantaloupe, right?”

“Yeah.” He picked up a fork. “Thanks.”

“Well," Mike said. "I’m heading out.” He gathered up his dossiers and spreadsheets and hoisted the box up under his arm. “I'll see you later, then.”

“Yeah.” Pete looked out the window again. “Thanks. And - Mike?” he said, just as he was about to step out of the room.

Mike stopped. He didn’t turn around. “Yes?” They both were talking to the walls.

“You’ll always be my work husband,” Pete said. “You’ll always know things no real husband can ever know.” A hesitant pause. He didn’t know if that was enough. “Does that make you feel any better?”

Mike considered for a moment. “Thank you.” Then, quieter: “Thank you.”

Pete nodded.

“Oh, and, uh,” Mike said. “Before I forget, you're going to have to binge the entirety of Game of Thrones before Friday. I told Chasten that you were a big fan.”

* * *

_"I mean, most of the people I interacted with were either people who needed something from me, people I needed something from or people who worked for me. So it’s not, like, a very healthy pool for dating is what I’m saying... I find this guy, this cute guy with a big smile, and I’m like, I want to know this guy. So we start chatting. Well, I was chatting with a lot of people, but obviously, he’s the one I remember because that was Chasten."_ \- Pete Buttigieg, [The Daily podcast](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/podcasts/the-daily/pete-buttigieg.html)


	16. December 21, 2016: South Bend, Indiana

The first time that Mike Schmuhl ever met Peter Buttigieg, he was tasked with making a delivery.

It was the day he was scheduled to tour his new high school. That morning his father surprised him by sitting down to breakfast early, carrying a copy of a book he’d written. With great magnanimity he extended it over the table.

“Thank you,” Mike said, taken aback at the gift. He’d made a practice of conspicuously studying his father’s books in front of him, but the hint that he’d appreciate his own copies had never landed before.

“Oh, that’s not for you,” his father said cheerfully. He began buttering his toast. “It’s for somebody at the high school.”

“I don’t know anybody at the high school,” Mike said.

“But you will.” He smiled to himself. “I talked to Joe Buttigieg at lunch yesterday.”

Mike pressed down on his spoon, hard, drowning cereal beneath it. “Dad.”

“You’re adrift. You need strong role models.”

“I can find my own role models. I’m fucking fourteen.”

Immediately a knife, butter still on the tip, was touching Mike’s chin. “You will never,” his father said, “use that kind of word at this table again.”

“I’m sorry.” The knife didn’t move. He let out a breath, pushing it as close to a sigh as possible. “I’m sorry, sir.”

His father glared but withdrew the knife. To Mike’s queasiness, he continued buttering without wiping it off. “I talked to Joe, and I arranged for you to get a tour from his son. His name is Peter. And I can promise you, that boy hasn’t sworn once in his life, let alone at the breakfast table.”

“You’ve told me who Peter Buttigieg is,” Mike said, wincing and wiping his chin off with a napkin. “Many times, in fact.”

“Well, I didn’t know if you’d remember. You never pay attention to what I say.” He bit into his toast and chewed, loudly. There was a long pause before he swallowed and spoke again. “Now. Peter is an extraordinary young man. He’s going into politics. You have an interest in politics.”

Mike started mumbling. “More journalism, but…”

“That’s your first lesson for today: in the modern world, the two are aligning, and in pernicious ways. Ailes just went to Fox, for God’s sake. Stay vigilant. Be cynical.”

Mike was tired of the argument, but he wearily recited his counterpoint anyway. “Politicians and journalists are meant to have an adversarial relationship. It’s set forward in the Constitution that - ”

“_Meant to have_ and _do have_ are two very different things. We’re devolving. I can promise you that twenty years from now, when we have this conversation again, you’ll have taken my position. But you’re wandering, Michael. This conversation is about Peter.”

“I’m going to be late.”

Years later, every time he thought back to this moment, he was surprised anew at how simultaneously mundane and memorable it was. His father leaned over the kitchen table they'd eaten at thousands of times before, eyes burning with the urgency of his conviction, butter melting on toast, cereal crackling in milk, a scene both familiar and utterly unforgettable.

“Peter Buttigieg,” his father said, “is going to be a very important man someday. If he surrounds himself with the right people - with _smart_ people - he might even be governor. Maybe more. Assuming you stay interested in politics, it would be beneficial for you to befriend a talent like that.”

“Great,” Mike said. His brain spun for an irreverent quip to break the unnervingly reverent atmosphere. “I’ll befriend the future President right after I memorize my locker combination.”

His father ignored him and sat back. “I told Joe I’d send along one of my books for Peter, to thank him for his trouble. So make sure you give this to him. Peter is interested in politics and a voracious reader.”

“I’m interested in politics and a voracious reader,” Mike said.

“Then you’ll get along splendidly, won’t you?”

Mike retained no further memory of the breakfast, or why exactly he was running so late. He did remember hurrying into his bedroom to grab a sweater and his backpack, and, after glancing down the empty hallway, closing his door and looking at the book. It was called _Statecraft and Stagecraft: American Political Life in the Age of Personality_. His father had signed it and inscribed it to “Peter Buttigieg, with admiration.” He opened to the first sentence of the preface.

_A few months before his death in 1961, James Thurber began an essay about the relationship between politics and entertainment by writing: “History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.”_

Mike hadn’t read this book yet. But as an aspiring journalist interested in the art of storytelling in politics, he was intrigued against his will.

Fuck Peter Buttigieg, he decided. If he really was as smart as everyone said, he could find his own copy. With a quick jealous motion, he lifted up his mattress and shoved the book beneath his Playboy magazine. When he met Peter, he had no gift to give - and it turned out that Peter hadn’t minded.

Mike remembered that morning while standing on Peter Buttigieg’s front porch twenty years later. Funny, he thought to himself, how their partnership would begin and end with a delivery. This delivery, though, couldn’t be intercepted or controlled or pettily shoved away under a bed in a fit of pique. This one actually had to be dealt with.

A dozen emotions fought for primacy in his chest. Disgust. Embarrassment. Disappointment (some in Pete, more in Chasten, but mainly in himself). Frustration. Loneliness. Grief. Relief. Fury. Confusion. Condescension. Admiration. Outright adoration.

But none of those emotions won out. In the end, all he felt was dread.

So he sighed, dug in his pocket for a pill, dry-swallowed it, and rang the doorbell.

* * *

“Well,” Pete said, taking out the false bottom in the lowest drawer of his desk. He brought out the whiskey bottle first, then the two glasses, and set them on the desktop. Mike startled both times.

He was uncomfortable. The cinematic three-way showdown he’d imagined occurring in front of the happy couple’s ironically sparkling Christmas tree wasn’t materializing. Instead, Pete had opened the door and ushered him into what felt like a tomb. (“Sorry,” he'd apologized. “Chasten’s visiting friends over winter break. So I’m trying to save a few dollars on the heating bills. We’re having a literal cold war over the thermostat.”) The only hint of Christmas in the house had been the heavy scent of a fresh pine tree. In the dark, the odor had made Mike feel like he was in some kind of cursed forest.

“So what’s on your mind?” Pete had asked, closing the front door. “Strategy session?”

Mike had started unwinding his scarf, but once he felt the chill creeping up his neck, he wound it back up again. “Yeah. Something like that.” He’d hesitated. “Do you still have desk whiskey?”

And that question was how he'd ended up in Pete’s office, sitting opposite him, his vintage print of Kennedy, and two glasses.

“Well,” he said as Pete poured. “This brings back the old days.”

A smile played at Pete’s lips. “Absolutely. Cold weather, empty house, forbidden alcohol…”

Mike watched him. Pete had turned on a single lamp, and it was casting a sharp moody shadow across his friend’s fine features. “Better company than I would have guessed,” Mike finally said.

Pete pushed a glass in his direction. “Thanks. I think. Want a cheap cigarette for bonus nostalgia?”

“But of course.”

Pete opened the drawer again. “I have actual grown-up cigars, you know,” he said wryly.

“It wouldn’t be the same.”

Pete dropped the cigarettes on the textbooks stacked on the desk. He lit up his, then offered to do the same for Mike. Mike found himself dazed by the smoke and hesitating, but ultimately he accepted the gesture.

They both tried hard not to cough.

“To the only other person in the world who knows what desk whiskey is,” Pete said, raising his glass. “Cheers.”

Mike didn’t move. “Chasten doesn’t know?”

Pete barked a laugh, as if he found the idea ludicrous. “Why would Chasten know what desk whiskey is?”

Mike glanced nervously at the textbooks. “Because he appears to be using this desk and I find it hard to believe he hasn’t discovered an obvious false bottom in a desk drawer?”

Pete eyed him over the whiskey glass. Mike swallowed. The intensity of those eyes, separated from the rest of the face, was verging on inhuman. “I like keeping some things to myself,” he finally said. “I keep the drawer locked when I’m not here.” He took a sip. His lips crinkled. “God, this is terrible.”

Mike took a sip of his own. “Jesus _Christ_. When did you replace the stash last?”

“No clue. The last time I even opened the drawer was…” He leaned back thoughtfully and put his feet up on the desk. “I think it was the day of the editorial, actually.”

Despite everything, Mike smiled faintly at the memory. “That’s right. I called you.”

Pete laughed. “No, you didn’t.”

“Oh, yes, I did. It was late, but I did. You’d been drinking, though. Doesn’t surprise me you don’t remember it.”

Pete let out an mused breath of smoke. “Really? What did I say?”

Mike helplessly watched that breath trail toward the ceiling, curling and dissipating around Kennedy’s face. He felt his heart beat a little faster against the folder under his coat. “Well,” he said. “You asked me to burn the list of women interested in an arrangement.”

Pete tapped the cigarette on the ashtray. “Ha.”

“And…” Mike hesitated. He took another sip. “You said you were scared and lonely.”

Pete’s smile was slick and satisfied. Triumphant. For some reason Mike felt repelled by his self-regard. “And look what happened next,” Pete said.

“Yes. Look what happened next,” Mike echoed.

A moment of silence passed. Mike could see no other option, no more opportunity to delay. So, despite the chill of the room, he started unwinding his scarf.

“I also,” he said, “promised that if Donald Trump won the presidency, I’d come back home to manage your 2020 campaign.”

Pete leaned back even further until he was looking up at the ceiling. “Shit, that’s right. We made our announcements on the same day, didn’t we?” He laughed incredulously. “Couldn’t plot _that_ one better if it was a novel.”

“Yeah. Well. Speaking of that hypothetical campaign…” Mike started, then stopped. He took another drag of the cigarette to steel himself.

“Have you found a place to live yet?”

“Still working on it,” he said, vaguely. “But in the meantime…” He turned in his seat and tucked his scarf on his chair back. He unbuttoned a button on his coat. Pete’s head tilted - just barely - as he looked at him. “I’m afraid we have something a little more pressing than my housing situation to address.”

“You haven’t even started yet. What’s more pressing than starting?”

“Pete,” Mike said. He hesitated for a long moment, considering what to say next. “Peter,” and at that iteration of the name, his friend stiffened. “You know I’m taking a risk accepting this job, right?”

Pete’s eyes narrowed, just slightly. “I’m vaguely aware this is a long-shot bid, yes.”

“No, I don’t mean that kind of a risk,” Mike said, quickly. “If anyone can pull this off, it’s you. I’m not worried about that.” He realized he wasn’t exactly sure where to go next. He took another sip.

Pete tapped his cigarette, this time with more force than was strictly necessary. “Then what is there to worry about?”

“I’m worried because it’s never a good idea to work for a friend,” Mike said. He continued unbuttoning his coat, slowly. “If it was up to me, I'd have you wait. But if you are serious about going through with this, you deserve someone at your side who you can trust. And I’ve proven my trustworthiness.”

“Yes,” Pete said.

“If I accept this job, I’ll be telling you things you don’t want to hear. A lot of them. But I don’t want those things to come between us.”

“They never have before.”

Mike unbuttoned the final button. “Well,” he said. “They might now.” He took a breath and reached into his coat and withdrew the folder. “What exactly has Chasten told you about the photos?”

He was somehow simultaneously shocked and not at all surprised to see the blank expression on Pete’s face. “Photos?”

Mike gingerly pushed Chasten’s notes and textbooks to the side of the desk and slid the folder across it, up to the soles of Pete’s shoes. “Lis Smith found these online,” he said. His voice was very quiet.

Pete looked at him, suspicious, but he swung his legs off the desk and sat upright. Mike watched Pete’s hands, morbidly curious to see if they’d tremble. They didn’t. As Pete opened the folder and studied the contents, Mike’s eyes slid up to look at Kennedy’s. He felt he owed him a certain amount of privacy.

An interminable length of time passed.

Pete closed the folder.

He slid it back across the desk. He nearly pushed Mike’s whiskey glass into his lap.

They both sat there in silence.

“I’m aware Chasten is gay,” Pete finally said. The cold calm in his voice was terrifying.

Mike braved the cold anyway. “But were you aware he’s a liar?”

“I’m sure,” Pete said, emphasizing each word, “that I don’t understand what you’re suggesting.”

Mike took another drink. “Well,” he said. “When Smith was looking through the list of exes he submitted for the self research book, she found those photos. They’re from a time when he told us he was exclusive with someone else. So she called him on it. He had excuses. He’d been drinking; he didn’t remember the photos being taken. Well, maybe so. But she kept digging. She got her hands on more. He got drunk and doesn’t remember one night? Fine. But...six weeks? And it sounds like the breakups were a fucking mess. _Serious_ accusations were made on both - ”

“He looks like he was very young,” Pete interrupted, not breaking eye contact, not even blinking.

“He may have been young, but he was old enough to know better.” Mike sighed and bit his lip. “Look. The issue isn’t that he cheated. The issue is that he lied to us about it.” A pause for emphasis. “He lied to _you_ about it. And so the question is, if he lied to you about it... Has he lied about anything else?”

Pete sat back again - back so far that his entire face was in shadow. He began to slowly, thoughtfully, run a single finger around the rim of his whiskey glass.

Mike swallowed.

“You never cared for Chasten,” Pete said.

Mike sighed. So they were having this conversation, a year too late. He dropped his cigarette wholesale into the ashtray. “I was the one who found you Chasten,” he said.

“And you’ve regretted it every single solitary day since.”

Mike proceeded carefully. “I love you, Pete,” he said. “I love Chasten. It just hurts when, after everything, you take a drama teacher’s advice over mine.”

Pete’s lip twitched in irritated condescension. His finger kept traveling around the lip of the glass. “Then tell me,” he said, still staring. “What am I supposed to do when the drama teacher has better political instincts than you do?”

“Oh, please,” Mike said. He was glad he’d taken his scarf off, because he felt the heat of his anger radiating from beneath his collar. “Nobody saw the Trump win coming. Not even fucking Trump.”

Pete slowly set down his glass and leaned forward. In response, Mike felt his own back press up against the chair’s. “You know, Mike,” he said, voice too quiet and too level and too even, “I’ve spent fifteen years agonizing, and now you’re coming here and you're telling me - ”

Mike interrupted. “I did not find these; Smith did, and, if you’ll remember, Chasten was the one who insisted that we hire - ”

Suddenly Pete was standing and leaning over the desk. “I’m your boss and I'm talking to you, so I'd appreciate if you'd shut the fuck up. So after years of hell - fucking hell, Schmuhl - once we _finally_ find someone who would have me - ”

“After eight weeks of looking!”

“So I got lucky!” he cried, and Mike suddenly felt the muscles of his heart being gutted out. “After fifteen years, and risking absolutely _everything_, don’t you think it was about fucking _time?_”

“People don’t find their soulmate in two months,” he said helplessly. Honestly. “You’re in love with him because he’s in love with your ambition. That’s all. And that’s damned dangerous quicksand.”

“So you’re running my campaign _and_ my sex life now? Fuck you!”

“Peter,” he said, exasperated, “you’re fucking gay! This campaign _is_ your sex life!”

They stared at each other.

The cigarette smoke kept curling up between them.

Mike took a breath. Pete blinked fast, three times in a row.

“Okay. Okay, I’m sorry,” Mike said, running a hand through his hair. “Let’s start over. I can only imagine how difficult it is to see those photos, and - ”

Pete sat back down with a spit of a mutter. “Oh, quit your prude act.”

“I’m not - ”

“How many _fucking_ times have I covered for you?”

“This isn’t about me,” Mike said between gritted teeth. “This is about you. This is about _him_.” It was a weak retort, but it kept Pete quiet, albeit seething. “Chasten has said nothing to you about this?”

Pete’s tone was acidic. “I’m assuming he wants to talk about it in person. He gets back tomorrow. I’m sure we’ll have a nice long chat then.”

“How long has he been away?”

“He left yesterday.”

Mike closed his eyes for a moment then opened them again. “Pete,” he said. “Lis called him a week ago. He knows we know. He’s _known_ we know.”

Pete froze. He stared.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You didn’t suspect anything? He hasn’t been acting strange? Guilty? Smith said he got pretty hysterical during their call. He hid that _all_ from you?”

“I…” Pete looked down, then back and forth at the scattered textbooks, as if he thought one of them might contain the answer to Mike’s question. “Yes.”

Mike leaned forward, deep in thought. Finally, in irritated pique, he took up his cigarette again, and let out a long breath of smoke. “He knows how much you want this. You two built everything you have on this.”

“We did not build 'everything we have' on this.”

“Pete, he seduced you with a fucking slogan for your 2020 campaign.”

“Our sex life didn't start with a fucking slogan.”

Mike sighed. “Fine. Whatever. I’m not going to argue with you of all people over the definition of seduction. But don’t you think, if he _really_ loved you…”

“He loves me.” Pete’s voice was a mumble.

Mike ignored him. “...don’t you think he would have been brave and told you the truth?” He was animated by a sudden wave of anger. “And not fucked _me _over into having to do his dirty work? It was irresponsible and selfish as hell.” He fumed. "And you know what? I bet it was deliberate, too. I bet he _wanted_ to put a wedge between us. He _wanted_ you to yell at me. Manipulative son of a bitch."

Pete hung his head. Mike watched him and took another drink. He pushed Pete’s glass toward him. Pete didn’t take it. Mike sighed. When he spoke again, he worked hard to make his voice gentle. “Look. Pete. Peter. Whichever of the two you are at the moment; I can’t tell the difference anymore.” He took a breath. “Chasten’s charming. And I won’t argue that he’s made you a better person. But there’s...something. There’s always been _something_. And I don’t know if it’s the actor in him, or the abuse, or the ambition… But I’ve never, _ever_ trusted him. And after tonight...” He gestured at the folder. “Do you want to talk about who has the better instincts now?”

With a quick motion Pete finished off his glass. He didn’t answer.

“You have a choice, Pete. You can either be serious about pursuing him. Or you can be serious about pursuing the presidency. If he's going to fucking blindside you like this, you can’t do both.”

Pete’s spine straightened. He looked straight at Mike. “You’re saying it’s either him or you, aren't you?”

Mike gave a halfhearted, one-shouldered shrug. Then - “Yes,” he said, finally. “I am.”

Pete leaned back and crossed his arms. His ugly laugh dripped with bitterness. “Well, happy fucking New Year to you, too.”

Mike followed Pete’s lead and downed the last of his whiskey, too. He reached for the bottle. Tentatively: “Another?” Then, softly: “I think we both need it.”

Pete pursed his lips, but, in the end, he nodded. Mike poured a second drink for both of them. He drank his quickly. Because the next portion of the conversation would be the last, most difficult part.

“All that said…” Mike trailed off. There was a very long pause. Pete took a sip of whiskey and slowly, despairingly, ground out his cigarette. He didn’t even seem curious as to what Mike was about to say. Mike entertained the idea of not continuing at all. But, in the end, he did. “The night when you got drunk,” he said. “You told me to write down what you wanted in a man.”

Pete flushed. “Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Mike. Timing.”

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to stop there, but, again, he didn’t. He soldiered on. “I wrote down what you said afterwards because…” He didn’t finish the sentence; his quiet voice got quieter. “But then you met Chasten, and I saved it. If you ever married him, it was going to be my wedding present. To prove how much I cared. But I figured it would do more good now.”

He withdrew an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to Pete. Pete accepted it warily, after a long hesitation. He opened the top desk drawer and fumbled for a letter opener, knifed the envelope open with a glare, and took out the note inside. Mike watched his face scan the lines that he’d memorized long ago.

_Kind, funny, ambitious_  
_“Not a sycophant”_  
_Likes stages and cameras_  
_Light blue eyes_  
_Good with kids_

Pete pulled the paper taut. “I said this? When I was drunk?”

Mike gave a sad half-smile. “Well,” he said. “You said it more poetically, and in paragraphs. But...yes.”

Pete reread it. He blinked a few times, hard. He looked up at Mike. When he finally brought himself to speak again, his voice was choked and cold. “Why the _fuck_,” he hissed, “would you give me this?”

Mike hadn’t known what reaction to expect, but it wasn’t this one. He got defensive. “Because I might be wrong,” he said, a little desperately. “Because even if I can’t stay with the campaign… I'll always support you, Peter, no matter what you do. I just can’t be the one to captain your Titanic.”

Pete stared at him. He’d been buffeted by so many emotions so quickly that, suddenly, he’d turned completely unreadable. Mike felt unnerved by the emptiness of his expression. He realized he’d said what he needed to. He stood up. “I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry this conversation had to happen. Please don’t hold it against me. I was only doing my job.”

“I - ” Pete said. No other words came out.

Mike buttoned his coat in silence and wound his scarf back around his neck, never taking his sad eyes off Pete. Before he left the room, he stepped behind the desk and reached out, just barely touching his fingers against Pete’s shoulder. Pete twitched at the contact. Mike bit his lip, understanding, and stepped back and left.

Descending the dark staircase made him feel increasingly tipsy. The pill and the drinks together had been overkill, maybe. But they’d made the calm easier to fake. As they always did.

Walking back out into the winter, he had a sudden swoon of longing to talk to somebody - but there was no one left who’d understand. He supposed he could try Lis Smith. Lis Smith with her dark silky hair and her love of the word “fucking” and the way she screamed - shrieked - at him in her voicemails, every single one of which he’d saved then savored. He dwelt on that idea for a moment. He thought about dwelling on it again in a few hours.

He decided drunkenly on the sidewalk that, all told, he and Pete had had a good run, all things considered. But he also knew, deep down, he’d decided this because he couldn’t bear to think they hadn’t. He realized that both he and his father had been right, in their own ways. And he wished both Pete and Peter, whoever they may be, happiness. He’d always done his best to split them up. That was the best he could do.

The December sky had gone a deep, dark blue. He left the house and drove away.

* * *

Late that night Pete washed the whiskey glasses in the dark. Outside, the street lamps reflected light off the snow and up into the low, ominously red clouds. He brought the glasses dry and sparkling back upstairs. He never turned on a single light.

Before he locked the drawer, he sifted through the contents. His birth certificate. A multipurpose knife. Military records. A South Bend Watch Company pocket watch. An envelope with “just in case” written on it. An old will and a new will, updated recently. Notes from Afghanistan - Iraq and McKinsey - the tapes investigation. A very long letter in a woman’s hand. The printed transcript of Mike and Chasten’s first Hinge chats, corners worn from rereading. Some very rough drafts of his earliest love poems, which frankly didn’t deserve to see the light of day but which he couldn’t bring himself to destroy. A collection of Post-Its he'd found on the refrigerator door, all inscribed with variations on the same message: _P -Will be home late. Leftovers in fridge. Love you._ There was more, but he felt a sudden nausea and stopped at those. He added the folder of photos and Mike’s early wedding present to the top of the pile and locked the drawer shut.

He lit another cigarette and finished it by silent lamplight.

He was moving the textbooks back when he started looking at them. Over the months he’d slipped countless love notes between their pages, but he’d never actually taken the time to read them. He cracked one open and tried, but very little of it made sense. He wasn’t used to books not making sense. He tried opening a notebook to see if Chasten’s notes were elucidating in any way. In cursive: _Teachers As Leaders_. He opened another notebook. In cursive: _Identity: Constructions and Negotiations_. He opened another notebook. In cursive: _Ideology, Power, and Politics_. He laughed a little at that. He felt a little fear.

As he stood up to turn off the lamp, he realized he’d forgotten to put away the bottle. After hesitating for a long moment, he tipped it over and watched the bad whiskey pour out and seep through that final notebook. The single gesture spoiled months of painstaking work.

* * *

_The essays that follow explore several different provinces of our political world. They wander here and there and all about, but probing the relationship between statecraft and stagecraft - for now and for the future - will serve as the compass and point the way._ \- Robert Schmuhl, [Statecraft and Stagecraft: American Political Life in the Age of Personality](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Statecraft_and_Stagecraft/x4wFDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT12&printsec=frontcover)


	17. December 25, 2016: South Bend, Indiana

They sat at the end of their sidewalk and watched the night side by side.

Across the road stretched the river: a wide streak of cold, unforgiving ice.

Above them were tree branches crisscrossed with the Christmas lights that Chasten had strung the day after Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving, Pete realized, had been such a long time ago.

As Chasten looked up at the lights and the stars beyond, his glove reached out for Pete’s bare hand. Pete took the glove, not accepting it, necessarily, but turning it over to inspect the stitching.

Their holiday had been quiet. They read for most of the day, in separate rooms. They ate at different times, each choosing different leftovers from the Michigan trip. Anne and Joe stopped by for dessert; Pete spent the visit staring at the trio’s easy camaraderie. Once they left, he thought about retreating to the piano to avoid conversation, but then Chasten dug out Sinatra’s Jolly Christmas, a melancholy album that belied its title. So he made a cup of tea instead and returned to his book, half-listening.  _ I’ll be home for Christmas; you can plan on me... _

Presumably they’d finish the night by opening the gifts still stacked beneath the tree. Pete was dreading this. But then Chasten asked him - begged him, really - if he’d go outside with him one last time before the decorations had to be put away. It was the kind of impulsive request he’d once admired. He didn’t find impulsiveness so attractive anymore. But it would delay the gift exchange, at least, so he wordlessly shrugged on his jacket, leaving his tea steaming behind.

_ Christmas Eve will find me, where the love light gleams _ , Sinatra sang to them as they crossed the threshold together, and Pete wanted to throw the speaker into the river.

“I’ve never gotten tired of this view,” Chasten whispered a while after they sat down, and he rested his head on Pete’s shoulder.

“Well,” Pete said, and there was a long silence. Finally: “South Bend has always been there.” He didn’t understand what he meant by that, exactly, but it felt right to say.

“It has been. For both of us.” Chasten took a breath. “I think it deserves a carol.”

Pete glanced sideways into his hair. “A carol?”

“We’ll steal one.” He thought for a moment. “ _ Oh little town of our South Bend, how still we see thee lie… _ Come on.”

Pete sighed. “ _ Above thy deep and dreamless sleep… _ ” He trailed off.

“ _ The silent stars go by _ ,” Chasten finished. He considered. “ _ Yet in thy smart streets shineth the everlasting light… _ ”

Pete gave an involuntary half-smile at that - but it hurt. And he could think of no lyrics to change. “ _ The hopes and fears of all the years… _ ”

Chasten finished quietly. “ _ Are met in thee tonight. _ ”

A few doors down, a front door opened, and porchlight spilled onto the snow. A young couple emerged carrying two sleeping children to the car, grandparents following behind with armfuls of gifts. Pete turned his gaze back to the river. But he could tell from the angle of Chasten’s head that he was still watching.

After the car had pulled away from the curb and drove away, silence descended on the block again. With a sigh, the warm pressure lifted off Pete’s shoulder, and Chasten laid down on the sidewalk, distracting himself with the twinkling beauty of the lights above.

Pete looked down at his bare hands. He examined them. They were red and raw in the cold, but he didn’t feel the sting. He wondered what that might mean.

A quiet voice. “Hey.” He glanced back. Chasten had seen, and was reaching out for them. Against his better judgment he twisted around a bit to let him take them. Chasten pulled them into the warmth between his coat buttons, and Pete’s fingers sank and curled into his sweater.

“Kiss me, Mr. Grinch,” Chasten said.

Pete leaned over and gave him a peck on the forehead. It was the best he could do. “I’m going inside,” he said.

“Just a little longer,” Chasten whispered.

He pulled his hands away. “You can stay out as long as you’d like.”

He stood up and started for the house, but Chasten interrupted. “Stop,” he said. “Look at me.”

He did. Chasten was scrambling up, taking off a glove and digging in his pocket for his phone. “I want a picture,” he said, stepping back into the street to compose the shot. Pete glanced ahead at the backdrop: the wreath hanging on the door, the cozy lamp lit in the window, the bright upstairs hallway leading to their bedroom. Their home life had never looked more picturesque, and it had never been more empty.

Pete faked a smile and asked the unanswerable question. “Why?”

“Because,” Chasten said. He spoke with difficulty. He looked from his phone to Pete. “I want to remember how beautiful this all was.”

Pete stared. “Well,” he finally said. “Did you get the picture you wanted?”

Chasten bit his lip. “I - I did,” he faltered, and Pete turned around and walked away.

They each made their way inside, banging their shoes on the porch to shake the snow and salt off. Inside, Sinatra still sang.  _ Sleep in heavenly peace...sleep in heavenly peace. _

Chasten sat down in front of the fireplace, not bothering to take off his coat. Shadows cast by the flame flickered across his face.

“I cheated,” he said, out of nowhere. “When I was nineteen.”

He looked up at Pete. Pete was halfway through taking off his own coat. He froze.

“And I lied to Lis,” Chasten said, turning to the fire. “I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t high.” A bitter aside: “At the time.” He took a shaky breath. “I was just sad. And lonely. My boyfriend was out of town. And… I went back to my ex. I cheated.”

Pete opted to keep his coat on. He slid his arm back through the sleeve, slowly. “Why?”

“He was handsome. I was horny. Plus, he had a house.” He clasped his hands. Looked down at them ruefully. “That was a big turn-on at the time.”

Pete sat down on the couch opposite. He didn’t know what else to do. He hadn’t drank any of his tea yet. He pushed the cup across the coffee table toward Chasten; Chasten ignored it. Pete pulled it back. “How long?” he finally asked. He tried, and failed, to sound casual.

“A month. Maybe two.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t.”

He sighed. “No. I don’t.”

They were silent for a while.

_ And to the earth it gave great light… _

Pete felt a hundred different lines of questioning taking shape in his mind. He tried to settle on just one. “Why didn’t you tell Lis?”

“I thought…” Chasten leaned back. He looked up and all around himself, as if the answer might be written somewhere on the ceiling. “I don’t know what I thought. She caught me off-guard. How was I supposed to know he’d uploaded these? Who puts photos like that on fucking Flickr?”

Pete kept pressing. “But lying to Lis and…” He swallowed and glanced down at the floor. “And...lying to - ” He couldn’t finish.

Chasten understood what he meant. His eyes took on a sheen of distressed sympathy. “I panicked,” he said. “I shut down. Because I thought you - ”

Pete was offended. How could anyone who claimed to know him, claimed to  _ love  _ him, ever question his loyalty? His loyalty was the only admirable thing about him. “I would never leave you,” he said.

Chasten laughed a little, even as the tears gathered in the corner of his eyes. “Well, you know me. Ever the connoisseur of self-sabotage.”

Pete leaned forward, took his cup of tea, and started drinking it. He watched him. When their exchange of gazes got to be too much, Chasten looked back despondently into the fire.

“Mike came here,” Pete said. “While you were in Wisconsin.”

Chasten’s head swiveled. “What?”

“He’s quitting the campaign over this. Says he can’t trust you.” He took another sip. “We’ve been planning this run for twenty years.”

“Shit.”

“That’s one way to describe it. And if I can’t have Mike as my campaign manager...”

“Lis can find someone else.”

“But Mike and I have a history. A history that can't be replicated.” He paused. “Not even with you.”

Chasten sighed. Pete could see the fire reflecting in his eyes: an unnerving struggle between sky blue and gold flame.

_ On a cold winter’s night that was so deep... _

“If I ask you a question,” Chasten said after a while. He struggled a moment. He started again. “If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?”

Pete laughed, bitter. “That’s rich.”

“I know.” He stood up, then sat on the edge of the coffee table. Their knees touched, and he took Pete’s still-cold hand in his. Pete felt as if he was observing the gentle gesture from a great distance.

“Do  _ you  _ trust me?”

He remembered the first time - the only other time, to his memory - that Chasten had asked that question. He’d said yes then; he’d  _ begged  _ yes then, incoherently, in what must have come across as a cheap pathetic parody of the closing lines of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy: _ yes, of course, yes, God, please, yes. _

But tonight was a different night, in darker circumstances. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to feel. Or even if he could feel at all.

“I’m trying to trust you,” he finally said, and that was as close to the truth as he could get.

Chasten squeezed his hand. “If you can’t trust me… Then I think…” He took a shaky breath. “Then I think it’s already over.”

Pete didn’t understand. He laughed. “What?”

Chasten didn’t laugh. He tucked the fingers of Pete’s hand into the palm, and lifted it to his own face. He rested his chin on it, and when he spoke, Pete felt the soothing vibration echoing through his knuckles.

“This is why I didn’t say anything for so many days,” Chasten said. His voice was cracking. He was cracking. “I needed time to find the strength to say it, if I needed to say it, and… I do.”

The words stole the breath from Pete’s lungs. He felt as if he was hearing a wedding vow recited in reverse.

“I’m not good for you. For what you want to do. We should split up.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Chasten looked as hurt as if he’d been slapped. “Do you really think I’d joke about this?”

“Honestly? I’m not sure  _ what  _ you joke about anymore.”

“Oh, Peter,” he breathed. “You don’t understand. You’ve never understood. You’re my soulmate.”

_ Soulmate _ . He ignored the word, which had never been uttered between them before. The gall of the drama and the manipulation made him nauseous. “Can you,” Pete asked, struggling to control his tone, “go  _ two fucking minutes _ without issuing some kind of apocalyptic proclamation? It’s not like you cheated on  _ me _ .” He hesitated. “Or - ?” and he suddenly felt as if his entire world might self-combust.

Chasten’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Of  _ course  _ I’ve never cheated on you. But you shouldn’t have to wonder. And now you always will.”

Pete said nothing. He took another sip of tea. He was starting to feel fear, and his hand was shaking. Chasten saw this. He gently took the cup away.

“I’ve been with men I couldn’t trust,” Chasten said, setting the tea down. “Men I still can’t trust. And I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Let alone you.”

Pete felt the bile of emotion rising in his throat. He reminded himself that his role in this relationship was to play the measured ballast. He swallowed the bile down. “You have to know you’re overreacting,” he finally said. “You were young. We all make mistakes.”

“You never did,” Chasten said darkly, and there was a veritable ocean of emotion beneath those three short words.

Pete laughed, bitter again. “Oh, I’ve made plenty of mistakes. But when you make my mistakes, you get praised for your virtue.”

Chasten sighed. He still held Pete’s hand in his. Gently he pressed against the fingers, opening them up like a flower. Then he took his thumb and began, very lightly, to rub back and forth just beneath the fingers, at the very top of the palm. Immediately Pete felt every nerve in his hand arching into the touch. Chasten had never done this before, and because Chasten had never done this before, Pete had never felt it before. A few weeks ago, he would have melted into it without a question. Now all he could wonder was who had taught him this, and when, and where, and why? He was disgusted to find that his jealousy made the delicate sensation all the more heavenly.

“Peter,” Chasten finally said. “Someday, whether it’s in four years or forty, you’re going to become President of the United States. You’re going to inspire a lot of people. But you’re also going to make a lot of enemies. You won’t be allowed to make dumb mistakes.” His voice went quiet. “The man you marry can’t be a dumb mistake.”

And with that, the truth finally dawned on him. “This wasn’t your only...mistake, was it?”

Chasten looked away. The thumb slowed its caress but didn’t stop. “Maybe not.”

His mind began to race. “You drank a lot, didn’t you?”

“Well.”

“What else? Drugs? Parties? What?”

Pete had to strain to hear his answer. “If we’re over,” he said, voice small, “then I don’t have to tell you.”

The consequences, his  _ fury  _ over this betrayal, came over him in a great wave, lurching through like a tsunami. “So you have no idea what you’ve all done? What obscene shit might be out there?”

“I - ”

He pulled his hand away. The heavenly sensation vanished, leaving an electric burn in its wake. More pieces started falling into place; he was immediately humiliated that he had never assembled them before. “You manipulative son of a  _ bitch _ . You didn’t give up on politics because you were gay, did you? You gave up on politics because you’d be a walking talking blackmail target.”

The tears were starting to seep through Chasten’s lashes, even as he tried to blink them away. “I was so lonely, Peter,” he whispered. “I was  _ so fucking lonely _ . If I’d have known you were waiting, everything would have been different, and - ”

“How could you not fucking tell me this? Why the fuck did you agree to - to  _ us _ , if - ?” He couldn’t even finish his sentence.

Chasten looked up at him, rims of his eyes red and raw. “Because I had the great misfortune,” he said, voice unsteady, “of falling in love with you.”

Pete stared.

“And I thought that if I could wait long enough, if I could learn enough about you, I’d become so indispensable that you’d  _ have  _ to keep me, and I - I don’t know; I thought I could figure out the rest along the way, and - ”

“‘ _ Along the way _ ’?” he said, voice going shrill. “That doesn’t make any fucking sense!”

“Oh!” Chasten exclaimed. “So now this relationship is supposed to  _ make fucking sense?” _

He had no answer to that.

The pitch of Chasten’s voice lowered. “So forgive me, President Buttigieg, that I didn’t start planning your run in kindergarten. That I didn’t start sacrificing everything for you until I knew you existed. But if  _ that’s  _ the standard you’re going to hold a husband to…” He trailed off darkly: pityingly, almost. “Then you’re going to die alone and miserable. And you know what? You’ll fucking  _ deserve  _ it. You’ll fucking deserve every last  _ minute  _ of it.”

“You bastard,” Pete breathed.

Chasten was incredulous. “ _ I’m _ the bastard?”

They stared at each other like tennis rivals staring across the net in the split-second before the serve. All it had taken was a few well-placed words for the previous year and a half to feel as if it had never existed.

Pete tried to step back from the edge. He shook his head. He thought. “Look,” he finally said. “Let’s be reasonable. Politics isn’t everything. If you want to stay out of the mud, I’ll stay in South Bend. Fuck, I’ll get out of public service altogether.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll go back to McKinsey. We’ll buy a big house. Have two kids, a boy and a girl. Get season tickets to the theater. Travel the world. I’ll give you everything you ever wanted.”

He couldn’t even fool himself, so he certainly couldn’t fool Chasten. “No, you won’t.”

He tried another tack. “It’s very unlikely that I’ll ever become president.”

“No, it’s not.”

The terrifying thing was, he was right. He didn’t know what else to say. He had nothing left to offer. And what he had offered wasn’t real, anyway.

_ The world in solemn stillness lay, to hear the angels sing... _

“I can’t stay here tonight,” Chasten said.

“You live here,” he said, with a flash of annoyance.

“I’m not sleeping in our bed.”

"Then use the guest room. I don’t want to fucking sleep with you, either.”

“I think I’ll go to a hotel.”

Pete threw up his arms. “Fine. Go. I can’t stop you.”

Chasten stood and looked down at him. Nodded.

“But before you go,” Pete said, and he paused for a moment, weighing his words. “I want you to know, I’ve always wondered why you have so many exes. But I finally get it now. Because you string them along. You tell them exactly what they want to hear. You become exactly who they want you to be. You manipulate the  _ fuck  _ out of them and everyone around them. You boss them around. You control their lives. Then the  _ minute  _ your bullshit catches up with you, you run away and go find your next victim.” He took the fireplace poker and prodded the embers. “Well, thank God I figured it out before I proposed. But it would have been nice to know before I fucking hired you for the job.”

He glanced up. He waited with bated breath for the counterassault. He waited to be destroyed, as he longed to be destroyed. He waited to be torn apart for everything he hated in himself: his ambition, his obsessions, his selfishness, his facades, his calculation, his cruelty, his ineptitude at intimacy of every kind -

“I need to pack some things,” Chasten said, weakly, and he went upstairs.

Pete collapsed back into the couch cushions. He’d been out-maneuvered yet again. Nothing that Chasten could say would hurt more than the years of self-hatred about to wrack him after that outburst...and Chasten knew it. As ever, he understood him better than he understood himself, and he despaired.

When he started hearing footsteps creaking above, slowly moving between the dresser and the bed, he stood up and wandered into the dining room. He’d been working on taxes and end-of-year bills, and his checkbook was still on the table. When he saw it, he realized what he was duty bound to do. He wrote out a check, emptied his wallet of cash, and paperclipped them both together.

When Chasten saw him waiting at the foot of the stairs, he slowed. As his face finally descended into the light, Pete saw that the expression on it was afraid. In that moment he wanted nothing more than to die.

He extended the money.

“What’s this,” Chasten asked, uncertain.

“Cash for the hotel,” he said. “And a check for everything else.”

Chasten sighed. “Peter,” he said, and then he leafed through and saw the check. His eyes widened. “ _ Peter _ .” He became flustered. “I can’t take this; I - ”

“Please.”

Chasten looked up. “Is this your way of calling me a whore?”

The idea made him want to retch. “Of course not. It’s just the only way left to say how sorry I am.” His voice sank to a rasp. “About everything.”

He softened. “Peter, don’t be - ”

“Then think of it,” he interrupted, “as the only way left to thank you.”

“I don’t know what…” Chasten swallowed. He wiped a tear away. “My other exes - they’d never - ” He stopped.

_ Exes _ . “Put it toward your loans,” Pete heard himself say from far away, and something within him approved of that idea: it was practical.

The suggestion triggered a tearful laugh. It was the most bittersweet sound he’d ever heard. “Oh, Peter,” he said, looking down at the check in disbelief. “You know me better than that.”

He reached out to stroke Chasten’s hair. His hands were suddenly ravenous to feel, to touch; they were grasping the implications of the long lonely future ahead far faster than his conscious mind was. “Fine,” he said. “Use it however you want. Use it to travel. Longest way round is the shortest way home, right? Cairo. Tokyo. Istanbul. Go on an adventure.”

Chasten looked up. “I already have,” he whispered.

He stepped forward. Pete felt a chaste brush of lips at his cheek, just barely there:  _ thank you _ . Then warm, shaky breath hesitated on the skin below his right ear:  _ goodbye _ . His heart stopped like a watch that had unwound. That was the first spot that Chasten had found the first time they’d slept together. For thirty-three years he’d lived in that skin, never conceiving of his own capacity to be undone by it, but it had taken Chasten only thirty-three seconds to find it. He remembered reaching out, grasping at sleeves, taken aback by what he couldn’t comprehend or control, desperate for leverage, for anything to push back against or pull back on; he’d panted, panicked, whined for words; and no words ever came; but in the end he hadn’t needed them; because Chasten had understood the instinctive hitch of breath and the squirm and the little muffled bit-back cries, quick and fast and all in a row; so with a sympathetic smile, he’d waited and stroked his hair and laughed softly, quietly delighted at the intensity of reaction to his little tiny kiss in such an ordinary place. Then, once the first shock of contact had passed, Chasten had slowly, slowly drawn out every pleasure possible from that innocent inch of bare skin that he’d been so casually displaying to the world his whole life, completely oblivious as to its power to destroy him.  _ Oh, Peter, _ he’d whispered conspiratorially into his dazed whimpers.  _ You’re safe now. And I haven’t even started with you yet.  _ And as he’d kissed there, just tentatively starting to taste him, he’d sent spider-like fingers down his sides, inviting the rest of him into the feeling. He still felt haunted by the memory of that first inhuman moan, held back for a lifetime, sounding as if it had been pulled directly out of the base of his spine.

But there was no kiss now. No cry. Just the hovering breath.

_ Let your heart be light... _

Chasten stepped back. Automatically, without thinking, Pete reached out to grab his hand. Chasten turned away. He didn’t let go, but he didn’t look back, either. “I need a Kleenex,” Chasten said. His voice was breaking.

Pete said nothing. He pulled the one hand up to him. Reached out to find the other. Slowly, slowly pulled and set those hands on his own shoulders, so they were close again. He could see the reflection of Christmas lights in the tears. He took Chasten’s face in his hands and kissed the cheeks dry.  _ Gentler, please _ , he remembered Chasten whispering to him once, and he obeyed the long-ago instructions. He closed his eyes. He didn’t need a sense of sight now; he already knew the shape of those soft cheekbones by heart. The tip of his nose brushed at the damp skin.  _ Faithful friends who are dear to us...  _ Fingers curled helplessly around his neck.  _ Gather near to us once more…  _ He heard, to his surprise, a quiet shaky little groan. He didn’t think it was his, but he couldn’t be sure.

He didn’t want to force anything, but in the absence of protest he kept going, putting desperate faith in what might happen next. He kissed the closed corner of Chasten’s mouth, tentatively - so tentatively. He tasted tear salt there, faintly. Then, to his relief, Chasten gave in, albeit with a conflicted shudder, tilting his chin just barely, but finally kissing him back. With a swell of gratitude he slowly drew fingers down his face and then down his sides, gently pulling him in, in the same way he’d been taught to do.

_ Through the years we all will be together...if the fates allow... _

The kiss was starting to drown him; it was blooming beyond being just about the kiss; now it was about the electricity and the hands and the history and the fast breaths coming in unison and the scent of the warmth  _ (so familiar) _ and the fresh melted snow on the shoulders of his coat. They staggered sideways, too hazy to decide on a direction, just turning around, just moving together, feeling, until he felt a carved curve at his back and he realized he’d run into their newel post. Gently trapped there, with nowhere else to go, his face found its way down to Chasten’s neck, where he kissed and comforted the racing pulse fluttering in his throat, murmuring into it, begging it beneath his breath at every heartbeat:  _ stay _ .

He became aware that the song had changed.  _ Join the triumph of the skies... _

He stumbled backward and up a step, pulling, pulling at the just-barely-resistant small of a back, on the verge of imagining collapsing together into their winter down comforter, silly pointless argument over, bodies and instincts divining who’d really won the game - when suddenly Chasten broke free, and pushed back against his shoulders.

Chasten had never pushed him away before. He wasn’t prepared for what it felt like. The wash of lust had made his knees weak; absent support, he reached out for the railing, then just sank down to sit on the bottom step. Chasten stood over him. They both breathed, hard. To his despair, he saw that all the tears he’d kissed away had not only returned; they’d multiplied.

_ Peace on earth...and mercy mild; God and sinners reconciled... _

Pete didn’t break eye contact. He leaned his head against a baluster, trying to catch his breath.  _ I’m sorry _ , Chasten’s eyes said to him through the tears. _ I’m so sorry.  _ Pete could see his shoulders start to tremble. His heart ached and panicked that he hadn’t touched those shoulders one last time, kissed them one last time; they’d been so ordinary before, but now suddenly they’d become so impossibly dear. Already he felt a fury of jealousy over the next man who would get to possess them, who would have the chance to tenderly brush his shirtsleeves off to reveal bare skin and make him shudder - and they hadn’t even said good-bye yet.

“If you decide you can’t be with me...” Pete finally said. “You will love again.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he whispered.

He looked away. He didn’t know how to answer that. Was there an answer to that? He took a moment. He was still out of breath. “We don’t need to make any decisions tonight,” he said. “This isn’t a movie. This is our lives. This is real.”

Chasten took a Kleenex from the side table. “I’m not changing my mind,” he said, wiping his own face. “It just… It wasn’t our time, Peter.”

_ It wasn’t our time. _

Chasten bunched up the used tissues and glanced despondently toward the interior of the house; Pete knew he was thinking of throwing them away in the kitchen garbage. He felt devastation at the idea of Chasten leaving his sight even for a moment, but then Chasten did something that hurt even worse: he took more Kleenex and tucked them all, both wet and dry, into his coat pocket for later.

Yet again Pete was desperate for leverage, for anything to push back against or pull back on - but this time, there was no one left to tell him he’d be safe.

“Don’t leave me,” Pete whispered.

Chasten looked at him, but something between them had changed already; they were apart now. He spoke with great difficulty. “If you think I said  _ any  _ of this impulsively…” He didn’t finish the sentence, and it hung, desperate, in the air.

Pete stood, weak. “Well,” he said. He was beginning to feel stiff. Worn down, closed down. Old. He felt as if someone else had taken control of his voice. “If this is really what you want.”

“Of  _ course  _ it’s not what I want. But it’s what you need. And that’s what I want most of all.” He took the car keys from the little dish on the side table. The familiar melodic clink suddenly hurt Pete’s ears.

“I’ll be in touch,” Chasten said. “I’ll love you always.”

Pete took a step forward. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what he could say. He didn’t even know what he felt. “Thanks,” he finally said -  _ “thanks” _ \- and he knew as soon as he said it that he’d regret it for the rest of his life. But how was he supposed to know what to say? He’d never had to say goodbye before.

Chasten blinked, and he nodded, and he cast his glance down before stepping away. So this, Pete realized, would be his last memory of his first love. He wondered, suddenly, if it was polite to see the boy dumping you to the door. But before he could decide on the proper procedure for seeing him out, that door opened and closed. There were no decisions left to make, and he was alone.

He stood there shocked into shallow-breathed paralysis for a long while, scared that if he moved he might feel something new. He was only roused when a lyric sparked a late November memory.

_ Please have snow, and mistletoe, and presents on the tree _ ...

Shit, he thought to himself.

Slowly - very slowly - he opened the French doors. He approached the tree gingerly, doing his best not to think, not to feel, because it made sense to get this over with now. He stepped around the unopened presents, slipped into the chill of the bay window, and reached between the needles, right into the crook of a branch he’d chosen after a thorough inspection of the tree.

_ If only in my dreams... _

There, right where he’d left it while Chasten had been outside decorating the day after Thanksgiving, was the ring box.

He hesitated, unsure as to where he should put it. His locked desk drawer immediately came to mind. But then he remembered beyond the kiss, back to the betrayal, and he felt very, very cold.

At first he thought about tossing it into the fire, still spitting and crackling, though dimming now. But as best he knew, flames would only scorch the tiny diamond, not obliterate it entirely. He felt increasingly convinced that only total obliteration would do.

He could think of only one alternative. So he went into his garage, found his pickaxe, and crossed the street to the riverbank. He slipped down and stepped out onto the snowy ice, and he took the axe and he hacked. Eventually he saw a current running cold below, and he dropped the box and then the ring into the darkness.

He stood a while at the water’s edge that night, waiting to cry. He never did.

* * *

_ Home for Christmas -  _ [ Chasten Glezman, Instagram, December 25, 2016 ](https://www.instagram.com/p/BOcM-3wAWW6)


	18. August 29, 2015: South Bend, Indiana

August 29, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

“Do you think you could fall in love with him?” she asked.

It was late. His bedroom window was still open. He couldn’t bear to close it because the scent on the summer air still conjured  _ him _ . It was the same air they’d just strolled through - kissed in - fresh, fragrant, cornflower blue. He laid in bed, full moon silver, quiet breeze drifting in brushes across his skin. His voice was hushed, his body still softly buzzing.

He was on the phone with a contact labeled Streeling.

“What does it mean to fall in love?” he asked after a long thoughtful silence, which she hadn’t interrupted. “Because I still love you, in a way. So what will the difference be? Exactly?” He hesitated. “How will I  _ know?” _

They pondered the question for a long time, as if no one had ever asked it before.

“Have you ever read  _ The Awakening?” _ Streeling finally asked. “By Kate Chopin?”

“Of course.”

Her laugh was a cackle: loud and beautiful in its stridency. He smiled. “Forgive me for ever doubting. Anyway, there’s a passage in it I’ve never forgotten. Mademoiselle Reisz asks Edna why she loves Robert. And you’re expecting some big extravagant earth-shattering declaration, right? But Edna has the sincerest answer possible, and it’s so… It’s so goddamn simple in the end.  _ ‘Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing. Because  _ — ’ ”

“  _ ‘Because you do, in short, _ ’ ” he said, finishing the quote, and a tendril of breeze curled around the hand that had been held, lying alone now on the sheet.

“You never loved me because my hair was brown or because my eyes opened. And God help you if you loved me for my nose.”

“I always said your nose was pretty.”

“Yes, and I swear that was literally my first clue about you.”

“Shut up,” he said, still smiling.

“I’ll never shut up and you know it. So when do you see him next?”

“Next weekend maybe. Still planning.” Finally he was starting to fall asleep. He felt bathed in a glow.

“And how does that make you feel?”

He rolled over. “I’ll feel happy,” he murmured.

He could hear the smile in her voice, and for a moment it was as if she, with all her spark and sunlight, were beside him again. “That’s the next line,” she whispered. “Mademoiselle Reisz asks what she’ll do when he comes back to her. And Edna says,  _ ‘Do? Nothing, except feel glad and happy to be alive.’ _ ”

His eyes stayed closed as he drifted, but even half-conscious he took a moment to appreciate the words: their simplicity, their poetry, their potential fundamental truth. He felt as if he’d been granted a lantern to walk a dark path.

“So,” she said. “Spill the beans, Peter Paul. Based sheerly on that incredibly vague definition advanced by that single piece of late-Victorian early-feminist American literature… Do you think you could fall in love with him?”

He lost track of the number of breaths he took before he felt strong enough to answer.

“Maybe I…” he started, but then he stopped, ultimately afraid to say the rest alone.

Somehow she knew this, as somehow she knew everything. “Maybe you will?” she whispered with him gently.

And that was the first time he allowed himself to imagine being in love with Chasten Glezman.

August 29, 2015 - Michigan

“I’m in love,” Chasten Glezman said, “and I fucking can’t be.”

Somehow the confession released the tension he’d been fighting since South Bend. His foot began relaxing onto the gas pedal, and he watched with grim satisfaction as the speedometer needle crept recklessly upward. Barreling through the darkness, ninety felt no different and no more dangerous than seventy.

He’d left his window cracked open. The summer air shrieked an emotion that he felt but couldn’t express.

The voice on his phone was deep and kind and tinged with a German accent, and it didn’t seem surprised. “Who is it now?”

“A mayor. And a fucking fabulous one, too, judging by how he interacts with his constituents.”

A sigh. “Chasten.”

“I know.”

“Mayor of where?”

“South Bend. Indiana.” He came up behind a semi. The highway was so empty that he didn’t even bother glancing backward before switching lanes to pass it. “Don’t lecture me about the distance. I know it’s going to be difficult.”

“Does he have state prospects?”

“In my amateur opinion - ”

“Ha.”

“National. If he hires the right people.” He paused. “Or marries the right man.”

“Is he ambitious?”

Chasten just laughed.

“Okay,” the voice said, nonplussed. “Well, what does he want to do? Have you talked about his plans?”

_ “If my second term goes well, I might be looked at for governor.” _

_ Laughing. “Might be? We’ll  _ make  _ them look at you.” _

_ Peter’s lips twitching, suppressing a smile that Chasten knows that Peter knows he shouldn’t have. _

_ “And from there - where?” but he doesn’t need to finish asking the question before he sees the answer written in his eyes. _

“Yes,” Chasten allowed. “We have.”

“How long have you been going out?”

“Well…” The question pierced the ebullient bubble of his memory and he thudded back to earth, back into the dark night and the speeding car. “Since tonight.”

Another sigh. “ _ Chasten _ .”

“We’ve been texting,” he said, defending his heart’s insanity. “And talking. I’m not a complete idiot.”

“Texting and talking about what? The demographics of his Congressional district?”

Chasten had the fleeting thought that if he was ever going to die in a crash, he wanted to die in one now, because that had been exactly what they’d been discussing.

“You know what’s happening, don’t you,” his phone said. It was a statement, not a question.

“I know exactly what’s happening,” he snapped, and suddenly his words were passing by faster than the broken lines separating the lanes. “I’m funneling my long-dead hopes and dreams into him and using them as the basis for an incredibly unhealthy relationship built on the cracked foundation of my failure and his ambition, and it will inevitably end in tragedy and destroy us both and it will all come crashing down and the crash will kill me. That’s why I called you. I need someone to scream at me to dump the hot mayor before I get any deeper. I need to meet someone normal. A..." He struggled. "A non-profit professional or something.”

He was irked at the sudden laughter. “A non-profit professional?”

“Well, I want someone who cares about the world. Just not too much.” He took a shaky breath. “This man cares about the world, and he’s going to blow up my whole life over it.”

For a moment the only sounds he heard were the shriek of the highway through his window and the pounding of blood in his ears. He hoped there was still Tylenol in the medicine cabinet.

“Is he cute?” the voice on the phone finally asked.

“Oh, he’s so cute it’s a fucking  _ crime _ ,” and he slapped the steering wheel in disgusted frustration.

“Cuter than I was?”

Chasten glanced at the phone and gave a quick smile. “Well,” he said. “I don’t think anybody will ever be cuter than you were.” For a brief disconnected moment he felt like an exchange student again, every new attraction signaling an entrance to a new world.

“But was he good to you?”

_ A simultaneous reaching out of hands when the check is delivered. “Please let me,” Peter saying. “I owe you. I’m - I’m so much richer for your presence” - followed by a blush and a glance down to his lap at the involuntary poetry. Staring at his flushing face, and thinking - _

“He’s so good to me,” Chasten said. “I don’t have to hide anything, I don’t have to  _ pretend  _ anything.” He blinked a few times, fast. “The way he  _ looks  _ at me, like he cares about what I have to say, like he values my advice, because for some reason he does; and I can help him; I can  _ make  _ him; I can go on an  _ adventure  _ with him, and I - ” and he couldn’t say any more.

The voice on the phone was gentle. “You know I can’t tell you not to be in love with that.”

Chasten couldn’t answer. He stared through the windshield, out into the darkness, down the highway that, by the end of the night, would lead him home.

“That wasn’t the answer I was asking for.”

“You don’t call me for the answers you’re looking for; you call me for the truth.”

He conceded silently that this was true.

“I’ll always be a phone call away. Day or night. You know that. But - ” He paused. “For now, keep speeding toward that crash, Chasten. Please, enjoy every minute before impact.”

“I can always count on you to be comforting,” he said. Then - quieter, more darkly, and after some thought: “I should have stayed in Berlin.”

“You can always come to visit.”

"Next time I come into an astronomical amount of money, I will.”

He realized, nearing the crest of a hill, that it was so late - or so early - that the distant indigo horizon was beginning to glow, just barely.

September 23, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

“I’m expecting a fucking fabulous breakup story.”

It was late, again. His bedroom window was cracked open, and he could smell the acrid odor of burnt gold leaves creeping through it. He sat at the foot of his bed, looking out the glass to where the moon would be. The sky wasn’t dark enough yet to expose the stars.

“What?” he finally said.

“You were gushing over that boy all last week. Fuck, I was starting to wonder some really stupid shit, like whether it’s gauche to wear the same dress to a wedding and an inauguration. But then you - ”

“I wasn’t gushing.” He interrupted too late; it gave away his distraction. He began to study the patterns in the rug on the floor, black now in the dark.

“Are you sad?” she asked. “I want to mock you, but not if you’re sad.”

He let himself fall back into the mattress, feeling as if invisible hands were gently lowering him. Above, even in the dark, he could see the outline of a rust-colored water stain on the ceiling. He’d spent the entire summer crashing around the attic, trying to track down its origins, to no avail. He was aware that if he never found the root cause of the problem, the stain would keep spreading, and the entire ceiling would eventually come crashing down on his bed. At least he’d be the only casualty.

“Peter?” he heard Streeling ask.

“I - ” he said, and he fell silent.

“You're the one who wanted my help with this,” she said, and he had to admit that she was right. “I can’t help you if you’re just going to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.”

He rolled over to look at the bedside table, cluttered with a handful of empty beer bottles. “I’m not staring at the ceiling,” he said.

“Oh, God,” she said suddenly.

“No - ” he said, knowing just by her panicked tone where she was going.

“Did he make you have sex?”

The idea made him want to roll off the bed and then under the bed and then die there in the dust. “No!” he said, shuddering. “God, of course not. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

She became defensive. “Well, sorry; it’s just that - ”

“He’d never, ever…” He gave a long, meandering sigh. “Do something like…” and he didn’t finish.

“Okay. Sorry.” She paused. “But can you really blame me for guessing that sex is the root of your problems?”

“Oh, fuck you,” he said without thinking about it. Then he thought about it, and he said more. “And fuck the fact you’re always right.”

He loathed that he could hear a satisfied smile over the line, even as she said nothing at all. “Tell me everything,” she said.

Before he answered, he yanked open a nightstand drawer, unscrewed a bottle of Tylenol, and dry-swallowed one. He wasn’t sure if Tylenol would help the impending hangover - he had a vague idea he should be drinking water - but the proactive measure of taking a pill made him feel as if he was being responsible.

“So,” he finally said. “Last date. Dinner.” He closed his eyes, trying to bring himself back, to remember every detail. “We started off by discussing the pros and the cons of the House, the Senate, the governorship. When we were in the restaurant parking lot, he made me promise to use pseudonyms and talk in the third person so that word of my sociopathic ambition wouldn’t get out to constituents. It was thoughtful.”

“Yes, that’s very sexy.”

“It  _ was _ ,” he defended. “Anyway. Of course we were on the same page about everything.” He paused, turning the metaphor over in his mind. “Here’s the thing: it’s like we’re on the same page, but I’ve read the book from the front, and he’s read the book from the back, and then when you put us together, we have the whole book. I can tell him how things start, and he can tell me how things end, and together we know more about the book than anyone else.”

“Poetic.”

“Maybe. In any case. I was taking notes. I ran out of room in my pocket notebook, and I started scribbling on napkins. I looked like a deranged political scientist. Then…” He took a moment. “Then he paused, and he said something like, _ I feel you deserve to know I’ve dated before, just in case that’s a problem _ . Which felt very...incongruous. And of course I felt like humiliated virgin  _ shit _ , but I said something like,  _ well, it would be strange if you haven’t. _ Fuck if my heart cares at this point, or my dick.” He realized, too late, that he had said “dick.” He pressed on. “I’m sorry; I’ve been drinking.”

“Good.”

“So he started listing off names, and… And  _ describing  _ them, in very general terms, and…”

He tried to keep going, but, in a swell of drunken emotion, his chest tightened and his throat closed up.

After a few moments had passed, her voice was quiet in his ear. “I hate to break it to you, Peter, but we humans have sex.”

The gentle joke grated. “Yes, I’m aware, but - ”

She waited. He struggled. Finally she finished for him. “There were a lot of names, weren’t there?”

He thought for a moment about raiding his desk drawer for whiskey, but that would entail standing up, and the room was spinning enough as it was. “There were a lot of names,” he echoed.

“I had a lot of names,” she said. “And I was in  _ college _ .”

“I know; I just - ” He didn’t know.

“My list never kept you from trying to trap me as First Lady. Shouldn’t keep you from trying to trap him as First Gentleman.”

He closed his eyes. Her words called to mind an old recurring dream - or nightmare, maybe; he wasn’t sure which. He’s in the Residence, dressed in the first properly fitted tuxedo he’s ever owned, pacing, memorizing remarks written on notecards, and waiting to descend the stairs to a state dinner. He is irrationally impatient. Standing by are imposing hulks of men with darting eyes, their earpieces prominent, and buzzing aides bearing clipboards and binders and reams of memos, ensuring that his every last moment is choreographed, constrained, controlled. A door opens in the far distance. He looks up. Streeling glides down a hall carpeted in blood-colored scarlet, wearing a sleek retro gown of silk and silver. She never once looks up at him, instead chatting to her staff about details that he has been too thoughtless, too self-absorbed, to ask about, but that he will enjoy beyond measure tonight. She is so beautiful, so  _ good  _ at her job, and his heart melts. But then he blinks, and Streeling disappears, and suddenly Chasten is the one inquiring about floral arrangements and singers’ names and the ages of the children of the President of France. And he is so beautiful, so  _ good  _ at his job, and his heart melts. When he draws near, handsome and elegant and well-tailored, Chasten looks at him with those piercing periwinkle eyes - but he notices with a chill that they’ve started to sprout wrinkles at the corners. And for the first time, he doesn’t see any joy in them.

Streeling interrupted the drunken half-dream. “What is it with you and falling for sluts, anyway? Have you talked to a therapist about that?” A pause. “Have you talked to a therapist, period?”

He struggled to sit upright, needing to make a point. “That’s the thing. You aren’t sluts. You’re normal.” He took a breath. “It’s me.”

“Peter.”

He started warming to the topic in a panic. “I’m always going to be too much and never enough,  _ simultaneously _ .”

“You are just as incapable of holding your liquor now as you were in college.”

“I was never enough for you; I’ll never be enough for him; I’ll never be enough for anybody.”

She turned exasperated. “Peter Paul motherfucking Montgomery, you weren’t enough for me  _ because you were gay _ . Call me crazy, but I think that bodes well for Chasten.”

“Some of the men hurt him,” he said, out of nowhere. He was surprised, after he finally said the words, how badly he’d needed to tell somebody this. He saw himself tensing and untensing his hand into a fist.

“What?”

“He told me some of what the other men did to him, and…” He swallowed before saying any more, incredulous. “They  _ hurt  _ him.”

“Are you crying?”

He ignored her. He began to feel afraid. “When he told me,” he said, voice low, confessing, “I wanted to use my training to kill them.”

Silence. He felt defiant; he let it stand. Finally she just breathed “Peter.” He couldn’t read her tone, whether she was horrified or alarmed or admiring or all three, and he certainly didn’t want a lecture on responsibility, so he forged ahead.

“But you know what? I’ve been thinking. Am I really better than them? In the end?”

“What?”

“Am I any better, trapping him like this? The scrutiny, the criticism, the responsibility, the danger - ”

“Trap was the wrong word to use; I didn’t mean - ”

“I’ll hurt him,” he said. “Just like they hurt him. Just like I hurt you. And for what?”

The silence on the other end of the line was excruciating. “Darling,” she finally said. “You never hurt me more than you hurt yourself.”

Long ago they’d made a pact not to discuss the past, but he broke it, peevish. “That wasn’t the impression you left me with.”

When she spoke again her voice was unnerved and hoarse. “Promise me you’ll never leave him just because you don’t think you’re good enough.” Then, with rising urgency: “Promise me, Peter.”

He thought back to the fantasy of the state dinner. He tripped backward in that alternate timeline - to one of their upcoming early dates, maybe - when it would be easy to give some bullshit reason why it wasn’t working out, just to spare them both the years of pain. What were the conventional excuses? He felt humiliated he didn’t know. _ I’ve met someone else. I’m too busy with work. I don’t feel a spark. _ He asked himself if he’d have the strength to lie if the scent and warmth and smile of the man were directly in front of him.

He was drunk, but not too drunk to know he had no such strength.

“I don’t need to promise,” he realized out loud. “If one of us ever leaves, it’ll be him.”

He opened his eyes and looked at the window. Whoever had been burning leaves had finished for the night. (He hoped they had a permit.) The air was clearing. The stars were just beginning to sparkle.

He knew what she was about to ask before she asked it.

“Does that mean you’re in love with him?”

He struggled for a long moment. “I - I care for him very deeply,” he finally said, diplomatically. That was all he could say.

September 25, 2015 - Chicago, Illinois

He’d been stuck in the crawl of end-of-week traffic for an hour, and the map on his phone was nothing but a tangled skein of crisscrossed red lines. He didn’t believe in God, but he couldn’t help wondering if all this trouble was a sign from Him to cancel the date. Fuck, to cancel the relationship entirely.

Feeling claustrophobic, he ignored the texts from Peter and dialed Berlin instead. It was the middle of the night there. He answered anyway, true to his word as ever. “Yes, Chasten?” he asked. For whatever reason, he sounded as if he’d been expecting the call.

“I told Peter last week about my exes,” he said without preamble, slamming on the brakes harder than he needed to. Irritated horn honks blared all around. “I’d forgotten how many mistakes I’ve made.” Then, quieter: “I’ve made so many mistakes.”

“Well,” the phone said, and there was a yawn and a long moment of silence. “I won’t disagree.”

“Just - looking at this logically, why would he be interested in me?”

“Well, I presume he’s interested because he finds you interesting.”

He struggled with that. It still seemed too unlikely to believe. As a general rule, Harvard graduates don’t find small-town Michigan boys interesting. “Have I told you about Mike?” he found himself asking, and he sighed at his subconscious, that, in the end, it apparently all came down to this.

“Who’s Mike?” A pause, then a suspicious inquiry: “Are you sleeping with Mike?”

“Jesus  _ Christ _ , no.” At the suggestion Chasten rolled down the window to get fresh air, hoping the wind would flush the idea from the interior of the car. “Mike is Peter’s fucked-up sycophant of a campaign manager. Doesn’t think I’m good enough. His theatrical instincts are awful, so his political instincts are trash, too, but he’s very good at the nuts-and-bolts of the job, and he and Peter have known each other since they were kids. So - ” He took a moment. “Of course I have to wonder if he’s right. Why love me when you could just hire me? All of the talent, none of the mess.”

“Because you’re fucking fantastic in bed?”

Chasten flushed, horrified and flattered simultaneously. “Well,” he said, once he’d regained his composure. “That’s certainly a...compliment, but Peter…” He tried again. “Peter can’t…or should I say, isn’t in a position to…appreciate…”

“If he doesn’t appreciate your talents, dump him.”

God, this shouldn’t be this difficult. He ground through the words. “No, he doesn’t appreciate me because we haven’t…”

“Oh.” And then the syllable dawn out: “ _ Oh _ .”

Chasten suddenly felt protectively petulant. “Don’t act like it’s strange. He only came out in June. He went his whole life equating good sex with professional suicide, which for him, might as well be literal suicide. You can’t blame him for feeling...whatever the fuck it is that he’s feeling.”

“Okay, but…” He could hear the struggle in his voice, and he was surprised at how that struggle irritated him. “How can you…” Then after a pause: “You? It’s like… An artist without a paintbrush.”

“Is that a compliment? There are a lot of words missing from this conversation.”

“I’m just saying. Fuck Peter and a part of him will love you forever. Trust me.”

The lanes lurched forward foot by hard-fought foot. He felt as if he were crawling through a constellation of brake lights. “But what if… I don’t want to? For a while?”

“You don’t want to? Who are you?” He chuckled, but beneath that chuckle was an incredulity.

He was getting nowhere, geographically or conversationally. “Well, of course I  _ want  _ to, but… A lot has happened since…” He hesitated, wondering how to say what he needed to say. “I’ve never been exaggerating when I’ve said you’re the only one who never hurt me. Please don’t criticize that my feelings are complicated. Drunk-fucking someone off an app is very different from what I’m doing with Peter.” He muttered. “Trying to do. Tried to do? Fuck if I know.”

An uneasy, but newly respectful, silence. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too,” he said, managing to sound less bitter than he felt. “But. In any case. What’s done is done. And a lot has been done, and I just... He’d be fucking insane to still love me.”

“Well.” A sigh. “Men have been known to go fucking insane around you.”

September 26, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

“So I invited him in for coffee.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Are you fucking insane?”

“It’s what people do,” he said defensively.

“Yes, I know, but you’re not ready for...coffee.” She hesitated. “Are you?”

“Well...”

He could practically feel her leaning into the line.

“He was very sweet about it,” he finished.

She sighed. “Oh, Peter.”

“I can’t help who I am.”

“Yes,” she said, and there was an amused ice to her tone. “I’m aware.”

September 26, 2015 - Chicago, Illinois

“Did he really make coffee?”

“All he made was the same move I made on you the first time, back in the day.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

There was a shared sense of squirming pity.

“So it didn’t work, then.”

“No. But... He can’t help who he is. We talked,” he said, vaguely. “I stayed over anyway. Honestly, it was a gift just to sleep in the same bed. It made it less complicated.” He paused, lost in a memory. “During the night I woke up - you know how I can never sleep well in a new place - ”

“I remember.”

“So in the middle of the night, I woke up, and I looked over, and I had this thought:  _ it’s been a really long time since I gave a shit who was sleeping on the other pillow _ .” He bit his lip. “And I can’t stop thinking about that. Is it really that goddamn simple, in the end?”

“It can be.”

His brow furrowed as he glanced at his mirrors and switched lanes. “There’s a water stain on the ceiling he really needs to get checked out,” he said absentmindedly. “I’m worried the ceiling’s going to crash in on us someday.”

“So...you’re planning to go back? Even without the sex?”

“Well,” he said, tentatively. “Yes.” He began to try to justify that in his head, and he began to try to justify it to the phone, but then he couldn’t think of any good justification, so for a moment he said nothing and just continued speeding through the silence.

After the hour of driving past stark fields, this last part of the route invariably came as a thrill, the part where the dark sky began giving way to distant star-high grids of big city lights.  _ You’re home; the city is yours _ , something inside of him would always whisper. And he waited for that whisper as the markings on the cement blurred beneath him; and for the first time, he didn’t hear it. He was thrown off-balance a bit as he considered the implications of that.

“Yes,” he said again, with sudden confidence. “I’m going back.”

September 26, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

“I won’t yet, I can’t, for some reason, but I want - I would, if…” Peter said, and he found himself near tears at the vast chasm between how he felt and his ability to express it. “But I don’t have  _ time _ ; he’s going to wake up one morning and realize his mistake and - ”

“Peter,” Streeling said. “You can’t spend twenty years starving yourself and telling yourself cake is poison and then eat a whole fucking cake feast a few weeks later. Take it slow. If he loves you, he’ll understand.”

“No,  _ you  _ don’t understand,” he retorted, frantic. He wasn’t thinking now, just feeling. “I  _ need  _ him to love me.” And as soon as he said it aloud, he felt that need engulfing every nerve of his body, in a great wash of hot desperate fire.

He realized, too late, that he had trapped himself.

Suddenly she was yelling at him. “My fucking  _ God _ ,” she screamed. “You’re in  _ love _ . Why don’t you fucking tell him?”

“I - ” he said. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly.

November 5, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

He nonchalantly closed his office door and returned to his desk, biting into an apple and flipping through a series of departmental expenditure reports. There were a few lines he highlighted, and a few he needed to read twice to understand. He glanced up at the clock a few times. Sent an email. Returned a few texts. Finally, casually, he dialed Streeling. She didn’t pick up. He kept reading the report as he spoke, studiously ignoring the flush rising in his face.

“Hey, it’s Peter. You probably saw online, but I won my re-election.” He paused. “Chasten stayed the night. You were right. I’m gay.”

November 6, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

He checked his voicemails.

The first:

“For being the Poultry Lord, you sure are a fucking chicken. You _cannot_ leave me a message like that when you know I’m at work. I love you. Also, fuck you.”

The second:

“Oh, and of course I saw you won re-election, you smug idiot asshole. I updated your Wikipedia page accordingly. You’re welcome. Congratulations.”

November 7, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

He checked his voicemails.

“Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg, return my call at your earliest convenience. If you don’t, I’ve decided I’m not above adding a subheading about your collegiate sex life on Wikipedia. As you know, it will not be flattering.”

November 8, 2015 - South Bend, Indiana

He checked his voicemails.

“Why the fuck haven’t you called me back? What day is it? Sunday? Are you at church or are you fucking him? Are you fucking him at church? I haven’t heard anything from you, so who knows? I’m left to fill in the blanks myself. And yes, I know I sound like a stalker, but I’ve got front-row seats to a real-life gay MacBeth here, and I’ve become invested. Anyway, keep me posted, I guess. You fucking drama queen tease.”

November 9, 2015

After a long day of work and a too-short conversation with Chasten, he was curled up in bed, empty whiskey glass and a book of poetry on the bedside table. He’d never admit it, but the spare shirt that Chasten had forgotten was folded on the empty pillow beside him. The first night he’d ever stayed over, Pete had woken up and looked over at him sleeping and marveled at how meaningful it had been to see someone he cared about resting there. He knew that such a thought was ridiculous and maudlin and that nobody else would ever understand, but the folded fabric helped recapture the feeling.

He had no more excuses. He called Streeling.

The words “fucking finally” burst into his ear. “Ha, that works on two levels. Because you're finally calling me back and you’re finally fucking, get it?”

“Most people say hello.”

“Well, most people aren’t congratulating their gay ex on finally getting laid.”

“I also won a very important election.”

“Sounds like you also won an important erection.”

“Do you see now why I didn’t return your calls right away?”

“Oh, no, Buttigieg. You’re not going to steal my thunder. I’ve known this moment was coming for fifteen _very_ long years, and I just want to fucking  _ bask  _ in the fact that after all of those fights, all of those tears, you were wrong and _ I - was - right. _ ”

“You always were so considerate of others.”

“Shut up. So - I’m not asking for details - ”

“I’d fucking hope not.”

“ - but I want details. What was it like? What do you remember?”

He closed his eyes. “Jesus. I’m not telling you.”

She sighed. “You don’t remember it, do you?”

*

“Honestly,” Chasten said, “I don’t know how much he remembers.”

He was walking along the gray shore of Lake Michigan. He’d been spending the last few days saying goodbye to various places across the city that had meant something to him. This vista had been especially beloved, and as an added bonus, the roar of the wind and the water kept his conversation private.

“Do  _ you  _ remember anything?”

He cracked a smile. “Oh,” he said, “I remember everything.”

*

“So,” Streeling asked, “how did it happen? He drops you off at home after you win re-election and then - what? He sweet-talks you? I always went for Joyce, but what’s the seduction topic du jour now? Wastewater management?”

He felt a little indignant. “He didn’t sweet-talk me. If anything, I sweet-talked  _ him _ .” He realized he sounded very proud.

“ _ You? _ Sweet-talking?”

“Well. I may have been a little drunk.”

“Drunk on what? Alcohol? Winning? Him?”

“Everything.”

*

Chasten looked out to the point on the horizon where the sky and the water met. He kicked a loose pebble out toward the waves. “So we sat on the couch,” he said, “and he thanked me for helping during the campaign.”

“How did you help him?”

“I did the bare minimum, really. I mean, I’d canvassed for him, obviously. Analyzed the demographics of some districts. Proofread social media posts. Worked up some fliers. Made phone calls. Gave him some notes on his victory speech. Convinced him not to wear a hideous tie. Encouraged and smiled at appropriate intervals. Stood around shaking strangers’ hands. Used mnemonic devices to remember their names. Made them laugh at dumb jokes. Procured cheap beer, without being asked. Drank cheap beer, without being asked. Cleaned up cheap beer, without being asked. And he acted like this was all such a big deal, like I’d done such a thoughtful thing, and - ”

*

“He worked  _ so damn hard _ on this campaign, Streeling. Sometimes it felt like he was the candidate. But he never, ever overshadowed me, either; he always played dumb when he needed to. And he made every single person there feel like they were the only person in the room. I got more questions about him than I did about our priorities for the next term. It was just… It was virtuosic. I’ve never seen another performance like it from any other political spouse, ever. Maybe Governor Pence could salvage his future if Karen was half as good.”

“I just want to take a moment to state for the record that gay foreplay is very strange.”

*

“So we were on his couch talking, and he… We hugged, very innocently. He just felt so much sheer joy and relief, I think, because it meant that his career, his ambitions, everything he’s worked so fucking hard for, were all safe, and - ”

*

“And then I…” He tried his best to condense what happened next in a way that would satisfy her and not completely mortify him. “I think I must have said something corny. _Take me_ or_ I need_ or something godawful like that. It doesn’t matter,” he said quickly, “they’re just words, and - ”

She cackled in horrified delight.  _ “Take me?” _

*

“He said ‘take me to bed.’”

Even over the waves on the lake Chasten could hear hearty laughter. “‘Take me to bed’? Are we sure this man was born in the 1980s and not the 1880s?”

“Well.” He smiled. “Sometimes I wonder.”

*

“And he kissed my neck.”

“You and your fucking neck, Peter.”

*

“There’s a spot below his ear that gets a certain reaction.”

“Like you have.”

“Well.”

*

“He’s going to take advantage of that someday,” Pete said.

*

“I’m definitely going to take advantage of that someday,” Chasten said.

*

“I need to find out what undoes him. Right now I’m at a disadvantage.”

“Oh, I feel so sad for you,” Streeling moaned. “Having to experiment to find out.”

*

“And then I let him go upstairs and I followed and - ” Chasten shrugged, even though nobody could see the gesture.

*

“He led me upstairs. He must have. Because I remember him leading…” He didn’t finish.

“Oh, and did you like that?” She was pushing her luck, gleefully, and they both knew it.

His answer was flat. “I chose you as my girlfriend. What do you think?”

*

“And then…”

*

“He was very kind.”

*

“I imagine if Peter ever told anyone about it, which of course he never will, he’d say I was sweet or kind or something like that. But I hardly did anything, really. I just tried to keep him safe. That was all. But he didn’t hear what I was saying half the time, so...” Chasten blinked. He took a deep breath, suddenly strangely emotional. “He was so starved to be loved.” He hesitated. “As starved as I’ve felt.”

He looked out at the great sweep of the city before him. It wasn’t his anymore.

“And that’s it,” he finished.

*

“He made breakfast. And it wasn’t half bad.”

“Jesus. A true gentleman. Ask that fucker to move in with you.”

“Well.” He took a deep breath, suddenly strangely emotional. “I...did.”

*

“I was scraping off the plates and he was putting papers in his briefcase, and I could tell he was thinking about something, and I thought I knew what it was, but I didn't, because he turned around and he looked me in the eye and he said - ”

*

“Move in with me.”

*

“And I said, ‘Really?’”

*

“And I said, ‘Really.’”

*

“Fucking  _ what?”  _ Streeling demanded.

*

“And you said yes?” The disbelief in his voice was palpable.

Chasten nodded, face burning in the cold wind. “Yes,” he said. “I said yes.”

“A few weeks ago, you told me he’d be fucking insane to love you.”

“He is,” he said, and his tone was solemn.

*

“Are you fucking insane? You do know that cars exist, right? You’re allowed to fuck in hotels. Why make this any more complicated than it needs to be?” She gave a little gasp. “Oh, my fucking God, Mike is going to strangle you both.”

*

“I’m taking a leap of faith,” Chasten said. “And I’m looking forward to it, if only for Mike’s reaction.”

“You do know that pissing off your boyfriend's campaign manager is a terrible reason to move in with him, right?”

Chasten glanced down. For the first time in a long time, he felt misunderstood by the voice in his phone. But he also found that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t care. He knew his own heart. “That’s a joke,” he said. “The real reason is, I love Peter. I’m in love with him. And he’s the last man I’ll ever need to fall in love with.”

*

“Mike’s just going to have to realize,” Pete said, “that I’m only willing to fall in love once.”

* * *

  
December 28, 2016

Spending Peter Buttigieg’s money on a trip to forget how much he loved Peter Buttigieg was the best decision he’d ever made.

He was sure if he kept repeating that to himself, he’d come to believe it.

He’d felt spooked in Istanbul. Even halfway across the world, he'd met ghosts of memories at every turn. The rugs in the vendors’ stalls reminded him of the rugs on their floors. Napkins at restaurants called to mind the hurried notes Peter had scribbled during their first dates. And when he woke up during the night, he saw the empty white pillowcase across from his in the hotel bed, and watched it forlornly for too many minutes before rolling over.

He thought of all this as he leaned his forehead against the plane window, watching the runway blur beneath them as they raced into the sky. After restlessly wandering Istanbul, he’d decided at the last minute to take a trip to Berlin, to visit an old friend he’d gotten to know as an exchange student. They hadn’t talked much over the past year, but circumstances had changed.

He hadn’t yet fully conquered the jet lag from his first flight, and it didn’t take too many minutes of drifting upward before the roar of the engines lulled him to half-sleep. But when the captain made an announcement that something was wrong and that they’d have to make an emergency landing, he opened his eyes, wide. He looked instinctively at the flight attendant hurrying down the aisle. Her lips pursed, and he saw a hot flicker of fear in her expression before the plane began to lurch.

*

Time slowed even as it accelerated. He had a full quarter century of memories to choose from, but his mind gravitated toward one he wasn’t expecting - one he hadn’t recalled in months. He didn’t remember when it had happened, exactly. Those early days with Peter had been a haze of doubt and surprise and shock and fear and warmth and lust and love, and they tended to blur together. But he wanted to say it was in late October: he seemed to remember it being a time of changing seasons. It was before the election; he remembered that much.

They were both in bed. Pete was ostensibly studying a report, but he’d just turned onto his side, which was his tell, Chasten was learning, that he was close to falling asleep. He, on the other hand, was sitting up against the headboard, taking notes for his Monday morning class. He remembered the warmth of the light of the bedside table for some reason, and how golden and cozy it made the room feel, and how he wanted nothing more on earth than to stay in that room forever.

He looked at the man beside him. An idea formed, vaguely. There would be no sex, he knew, but… The tips of his fingers burned. “Can I try something?” he asked.

“What?”

“Touching your back.”

The reply was non-committal. “Mm.”

“Seems like a skill a political spouse ought to have,” he said, offhandedly. He knew he was at the property line of propriety even asking the question - but nothing was keeping him from pressing up against the fence.

“I…” He couldn’t tell if Pete’s voice was tired, anxious, or weak with desire. He didn’t know that Pete knew, either.

“It’s okay,” he said, returning to his textbook. “It was just an idea.”

“No, we should… I should...” He began to sound sleepily agitated. Chasten bit his tongue as punishment for even bringing it up.

“Forget it. Your re-election isn’t going to live or die based on if I touch your back." He turned a page.

“But it  _ could _ ,” he insisted. “Al and Tipper Gore, at the convention, they used physical affection as ammunition against charges that he was an unemotional technocrat…”

Jesus Christ. “It’s generally considered bad form to invoke the Gores in bed.”

“Please touch me.” Chasten glanced over, startled at the directness. Pete’s eyes had opened. “For the campaign,” he said, as if it was important to him that be clear to them both.

“Well. Okay.” He swallowed. “For the campaign.”

It was the strangest caress he’d ever given. He reached out for the warmth of the muscles, being slow and achingly careful, letting only his fingerprints touch. He felt Pete’s involuntary shudder.

“Should I - ” Chasten didn’t know how to finish the question. On second thought, he didn’t even know what he was asking.

“Don’t stop,” he said quickly. “I have to learn - ” and the words hung in the air when he didn’t finish.

“Okay.” Chasten’s initial trepidation was, against his will, melting into fascination. He felt as if there was a strange scientific experiment occurring beside him.

“I’m a travesty,” Pete said, with barely a hint of a tremor to a voice. “A goddamn tragedy.”

“Trust me,” Chasten said, thinking back to his life before this summer. “My expertise is tragedy.” He wondered for a moment how to say what he wanted to say. Finally he hit on the right phrasing. “Can I offer you homework?”

“Okay,” he said, but he was dubious.

“Feel the feeling first, then describe it. I think your brain is doing it the other way around.”

“I… How - ?” The  _ how do you know that?  _ was unspoken. Chasten shrugged.

“Let go for ten seconds,” he suggested. “Ten seconds of no thinking. Just feeling.”

He closed his textbook and set it aside, then leaned in to trace a pattern on his back. Suddenly he realized that he was writing something. He blushed to realize what.

Pete shared his findings too quickly. “There’s a bump when you cross over the spine and it feels like the skin gets too small and - ”

“Sssh,” he said. “I said ten seconds. Not two.”

Pete nodded. They tried again. The letters continued: a slow v, a slow e, a pause. After he’d counted to ten he lightly lifted his fingers off. He saw Pete’s shoulder relax.

“So,” he said. “What did you feel?”

The answering silence was so quiet that for a moment Chasten thought he’d somehow fallen asleep. But he should have known better: instead, the words all came in a single uninterrupted paragraph. “There’s this shiver,” he said, “that starts at the top of my shoulders. And I want to lean into it and curl away from it simultaneously. But I can’t do both. So then my muscles don’t know what to do, and my breath doesn’t know what to do, and my brain  _ absolutely  _ doesn’t know what to do. And then when you lean over I can smell your shirt and I - this sounds so strange; I don’t even want to say it.”

Chasten stared. “Well, now you  _ have  _ to.”

“I want to fall asleep in the scent.”

This strange observation knocked him off-balance with its honesty. It was, he realized, disoriented, the single oddest, most poetic compliment he’d ever been paid, and yet if anyone had asked him why, he knew he’d never be able to answer.

“Oh,” he finally said.

Peter’s voice grew small. “Maybe just...up higher for now? I need less; it’s not you; it’s - ”

He didn't answer, just reached out again and continued writing, using smaller letters now. An o, an u.

There was a silence that was awkward and companionable in equal measure.

Chasten had picked up his textbook again, still idly writing on his back, when Pete spoke again. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I’m sorry I let my ambition break me like this.”

He watched him for a moment, watched him breathe. “I wouldn’t be in your bed if your ambition wasn’t here, too,” he finally said, not sure what else to say. He hoped that didn’t sound self-serving. He wondered if it was.

“Why  _ are  _ you in my bed?”

“The CIA sent me,” he said lightly.

The joke didn’t get a laugh. “I’m fucking serious, Chasten. I need you for my career. You don’t need me for yours. You don’t need me for anything. So why are you dealing with - this?”

He shook his head, just barely. He wasn't like Peter; he couldn't verbalize these things on the fly. But he remembered all the times when he’d gone too fast and left too late - the greasy dives and the unfamiliar apartments and the backseats of cars - the bridge on the snowstorm in college - the rough and tumble and the scrounging for quarters and the late nights spent talking to distant stars that didn’t answer back.

“How can you not know?” Pete pressed.

“Well, I…” he said, helplessly. He just kept writing. An e, a pause, a y.

“You can stop now,” Pete said, arching his spine away.

“No, I - ” He suddenly felt the moment slipping past, and it made him panic.

“If you’re just here to be a live-in campaign manager, I’m not…” He swallowed. “Don’t make me into your kinky pity project.”

“You aren’t my pity project,” Chasten said.

Pete imitated Chasten, tried to copy the cadence he used when he was sharing gossip. _“‘Yeah, I slept with the governor once. And I mean literally slept with, because he couldn’t even handle me touching - ’ ”_

“Peter,” he said.

“When you get bored with me, you’ll run away and go to the papers, won’t you? It’s what Mike’s so afraid of. Maybe he’s right. You’ll break the NDA. You’ll tell the reporters - ”

“Peter. Fucking stop.”

He fell into a sullen quiet.

“Concentrate,” Chasten said.

“On what?”

_ For God’s sake. _ “I’m writing on you,” he said. “I’ve been saying something this whole time. And you haven’t heard it.”

As soon as he gave the game away, his hand began to tremble, just a little. He’s said the words countless times to countless people, but suddenly they’d assumed a great gravity.

“I can’t - ”

“Concentrate. Please.”

He sighed. “Cursive?” he finally asked.

“Yes.”

They laid there in the pool of the bedside light, surrounded by the old house’s creaky darkness. “Love you,” he wrote, three times, and then he pulled his hand back, as if he’d burnt himself.

There was no response. He suddenly realized that his pulse was fast and his breath had gone shallow. He was unaware of time passing.

“Chasten?” Pete finally said. He sounded distant.

“Yes?” He couldn’t bear to think a single thought.

“I…” There was a long pause. His voice cracked. Finally: “I’ve felt too much.”

A wash of embarrassment - of shame - swept across his face. “Yeah,” he said. He felt weak. “Me, too.”

So he leaned down and kissed Pete’s forehead as an apology, every fiber of his being fighting against the innocence of the gesture. But as he pulled back, a hand pulled at his collar, and Pete gave him a single, simple kiss back. Chasten sat up, confused at its meaning, but nevertheless convinced it had one.

They were quiet together for a long while.

“Look,” Chasten finally said. He felt dizzy. “If this... _ arrangement _ , or whatever the fuck it is, doesn’t work out…” He bit his lip. “I will hurt you. Not deliberately. Just because when relationships end, if they meant anything, there’s hurt by default. But - I just need you to know, I’d never hurt you over  _ this _ . I’d never break the NDA. I’d never ridicule you. Because…” He shrugged. “There’s nothing to ridicule. You’re enough. I’m in a position to know. You’re enough.”

Pete took a while to react, to absorb this, but then he nodded. Chasten nodded back, not sure how else to answer, and eventually enough time had passed that it seemed as if the subject was closed.

Pete was almost completely asleep when he began to talk again. “Can _ I _ try something?”

It was getting late. He leaned over Pete, turned off the light, sadly amused at his sleepy parroting. “Sure.”

“I want to keep you safe.”

He froze in the sudden darkness. “I - ?” Chasten said. His breath grew raspy. “Yes,” he finally said, not knowing how else to answer. “Keep me safe.”

On Monday morning, he opened his textbook. A single piece of paper had been tucked into his notes.  “Love you love you love you too.”

*

As they fell from the sky, he had no time to analyze why, out of all the conversations, out of all the quarrels, out of all of the love and the laughs and the silently played power games, that he’d gravitated to that one particular time and place. But he seized the quiet peace of the memory anyway, bewildered at and grateful for its presence.

They lurched in mid-air, to scattered screams around the cabin. The imbalance was stomach-churning: he felt the sensation of dropping even as the seat beneath him pressed up. The sudden motions made his neck feel as if it might snap off. Maybe in a few minutes it would. Bones burned in jet fuel flame, he knew. It occurred to him that such specific horrors were not the last things he wanted to think of, no matter how inevitable they now seemed. So he tried to think of something else.

He had wasted so much time. He had made so many wrong turns. And the one he’d taken this Christmas was about to kill him.

So in the end, it seemed, the only distraction strong enough to tear his mind’s eye away from the violence of his present and his past was the memory of laying in a soft and cozy bed, tracing loops of letters on a warm beloved back.

They dipped again; the terrified woman beside him seized his hand. A few seconds earlier, he would have swatted her away, but he was cycling senselessly through emotions now. He took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly; he told himself that all they were doing was dying - and in the end, everyone does that.

He took his phone out of his pocket. He was shaking uncontrollably, and it took a few tries to swipe off airplane mode. This felt darkly ironic for a reason he had no time to process, and he laughed a little, and the woman beside him stared.

Another downward lurch. More screams. The roar of the jet engines fluctuated in pitch. An announcement came from the cockpit, thick with static, delivered in a language he couldn’t understand. Apparently no one else around him could, either.

He glanced out the window before he realized it had taken nerve to. He saw from the view that he would have no time to second-guess.

Nobody would take his death well. It would be the great tragedy of his parents’ lives. But only one person would be completely undone by it: only one person might as well be dying here with him. He hoped that if he could pass along one last message it would somehow blunt the force of Peter’s own inevitable fall.  _ Not yet not yet not yet _ , he thought as he texted, thankful for every last second of grace. Just one message. He hoped against hope it would be enough. It would have to be. Because it was all he could do.

_ Problem on plane - lots of commotion - don’t know what’s going on. Captain said making landing for ‘secret reason’ - _

He hesitated, fingers trembling.

Another lurch, far larger than the rest. It felt close to final.

_ “I’m in love,”  _ he remembered,  _ “and I fucking can’t be.” _

After what felt like a lifetime, he chose the first six words that came to mind, and the last six words he wanted to think:

_ love you, love you, love you _

And he pressed send.


	19. January 14, 2020: Des Moines, Iowa

The five of them were in a bland windowless hotel conference room. They’d tried to find the light switches and failed, and so they clustered beneath the room’s only illuminated fixture, a cheap brass chandelier hanging from the ceiling tiles. Behind them was a set of looming podiums, props for a play, laying in wait, casting shadows even in the darkness.

Mike and Lis leaned against the wall, shoulder-to-shoulder, Lis’s lips tight, Mike’s face expressionless and dull, reacting not at all when Lis brushed a hand against his as she dug in her bag for her sunglasses.

Pete and Chasten sat at the room’s too-big table, Pete stiff, Chasten leaning back with his arms crossed, just barely biting the corner of his lip.

The box of Dunkin’ Donuts that Amy Klobuchar had brought remained conspicuously untouched.

“So,” Amy said, taking a binder from one of her podiums and striding toward them with it. “I know you’re wondering why you’re here. You’re here because I want to tell you a story. Now, I know how that story ends, or else I wouldn’t be telling you it. But - ” She paused. “I do want to fill in a few blanks.”

“With all due respect,” Pete said, “I have debate prep of my own, and I don’t owe you anything.”

Chasten shifted in his seat, casting a glance to his right that he hoped Pete would notice and understand. “Let’s listen to what the Senator has to say first,” he said.

Amy perched on the edge of the conference table, tracing the hard edges of her binder with a fingernail. She smiled at Chasten’s pliability. “Good boy,” she said.

Pete’s voice was sharp. “Don’t call my husband ‘good boy.’”

“Oh, is ‘good boy’ _ your _nickname?” She looked his body up and down. “I can see it.”

Pete made a motion to stand; Chasten reached out a hand to stop him. He tried to transmit a message through his fingers. _ Please don’t be the white knight. Please don’t think this is Camelot _.

“Don’t leave,” Amy said. “You’ll be leaving soon enough. But for now? You’re fucking staying.”

Pete shot a glance at Amy, then shot that same glance to Chasten. His dark icy eyes were aflame with fury. Chasten ached that he had no power to douse the fire.

There was a moment of long, uncomfortable silence. Then finally, as if comforted by their discomfort, she began to talk.

“As much as we both hate it,” she said, “you and I are human. That means we have weaknesses. You have several. Your fucking irresponsible, inexcusable level of inexperience. McKinsey. The tapes case. That’s the real reason you hired Schmuhl to run your campaign, isn’t it? I hope you treat him like a king. Because I bet he could destroy you.”

“Well, he doesn’t throw things at me,” Mike interjected, and for the first time in five years, Chasten felt grateful for his presence.

“And that lazy joke brings us to _ my _ weaknesses. But…” She trailed off, remembering the past: righteously, rightfully bitter. “Put yourself in my shoes. Or should I say _ my high heels _.”

Nobody so much as smiled at the joke, but the fact that it fell flat encouraged her all the more.

“Imagine being born in the Midwest. Dreaming from childhood of becoming President. Always seeking out your teacher mother’s approval by working your ass off at school. Becoming valedictorian. Feeling completely empty anyway. Being fucking desperate to get out, to make something of yourself. Graduating from an Ivy League school, magna cum laude. Being labeled a rising star of the Democratic Party.” She looked Chasten straight in the eye. “Marrying a teacher seven years younger than you in your mid-thirties.”

Pete gave a dry, perfunctory answer. “You and I might as well be twins.”

Amy slapped a hand palm-down on the binder, too hard, too fast. “We are not fucking twins,” she said in a quiet voice, letting the ring of the slap echo in their ears as she spoke. “You want to know why? Because I’m a woman. And a woman can’t afford to spend eight years dicking around reenacting scenes from Parks and Rec. I actually had to work. I ignored my daughter - _ my own fucking daughter _ \- to get ahead, and the people who loved me crucified me for it. I won three fucking elections to the goddamn Senate of the United States. I saw Hillary fucking Clinton, the most politically accomplished woman in the history of America, lose to… _ that _. Knowing, by the way, that her loss would directly impact my own prospects, my own dreams, and that - ”

Chasten could see that Pete had frozen under the force of the tirade, so he took over the defense. “Peter has been through hell,” he interrupted, and suddenly he felt a wave of culpability for that hell. He tried to push the thought away. “There are people who want to fucking kill him just because we - ”

She stopped him with a smile, pitying him for the thing he wasn’t asking for pity for. “Which brings me to Chasten.”

Chasten hated how she turned all of her attention to Pete, watching every twitch of his face, taking joy in his confusion, drinking in his vulnerability. “Is it a surprise to you, Pete?” she asked. “That I want to talk about Chasten?”

“I don’t - ” Pete said, but he trailed off, just uncertain enough now to feel unsure.

“So it _ is _a surprise. That’s what I figured, but…. Still interesting, anyway.”

Pete rallied. “There’s nothing to talk about when it comes to Chasten,” he said. “He’s a campaign surrogate. An effective one. Nothing more.” Pete glanced over at him. Chasten looked away. He didn’t want to watch the distrust, the fury, seep into Pete’s expression.

“A campaign surrogate?” Incredulity curled at the corners of her lips. “Is that what they call ratfuckers nowadays?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Amy returned to lightly caressing the binder, taking care to be gentle as her fingers traced around the hard corners. “Let’s just put it this way,” she finally said. “After you hear what I have to say, you’re not going to want to hear Chasten call you a good boy for a long, long time.”

If their conversation had been a chess game, those words were the equivalent to the queen sliding across the board after calling checkmate. Pete said nothing, and Amy relished her victory.

“So as I was saying,” she said. “I knew my weaknesses going into this campaign. And I knew that these abuse rumors would be one of them.”

“And are those rumors true?” Pete asked.

Lis’s voice came from behind them. “What am I always telling you?” she asked, and her voice cracked.

They all knew what she was always telling him, but they all sat together in the reluctant drawn-out silence anyway, waiting to see if he’d admit it aloud, and Chasten suddenly hated everything about the room: the ominous fake dark, the ominous fake light, the looming empty podiums from Klobuchar’s debate prep, the leftover cups of stale half-drunk coffee, the curling floral patterns on the carpet, the roundness of the untouched donuts, the squareness of the unopened binder, the laughter out in the hall, no doubt from staffers who, presumably, still had faith in what happened behind closed doors - or who were jaded enough to know and still could laugh anyway.

“Truth doesn’t matter,” Pete finally admitted.

Amy hung her head just briefly, as if in ironic homage. Chasten could tell she’d come to peace with Lis’s credo a long time ago. He realized, a little despairingly, that he had, too.

“So then,” she said. “Since truth doesn’t matter, when I decided to run, I also decided to play a game. Because, contrary to what you might think, not everyone on my staff hates me. Some are women. Some actually understand sexism. Fuck, they’ve seen it; they’ve _ lived _it. So….we tried to turn our weakness into a strength. Into a plan to learn more about the field.”

She stood up then, as if lecturing a class on how a campaign ought to be run. She took out a pen from her blazer pocket and passed it back and forth between her fingers as she spoke.

“You can learn a lot about someone by dangling a prize,” she said. “So back in October we dangled the biggest prize we had. A fake transcript, with the promise of a fake video to back it up. And then we set our trap, and we waited. We wanted to know who was the most desperate.” She clicked the pen. “Sawyer fucking Hackett, by the way. Goddamn imbecile.”

With every word Chasten felt increasingly nauseous. He made a motion to reach out for Pete’s hand - then realized he shouldn’t show weakness in front of Amy, _ then _realized that in thirty seconds, the last thing in the world that Pete would want to do would be to hold his hand. He glanced down at Pete’s lap - saw the watch ticking on Pete’s wrist - felt his heart moan.

“But we weren’t desperate,” Pete said.

“Maybe _ you _weren’t.” Amy smiled. “But Chasten was.”

Chasten could practically feel the air between them chill. Pete shifted in his seat, just barely tilting away. “Excuse me?” he said.

“Yes, while you and I were in the green room discussing the debate, Chasten went rogue on you. My staffer met with one of your staffers. The fake transcript was exchanged. Promises of a corroborating video were floated. Then my staffer trailed yours to see who was next up in the chain of command. Easy to do backstage at events like those. Everything’s so goddamn chaotic. And guess who was the last one to take the folder before slipping back into your green room? Mild-mannered theater teacher, my ass. All under the guise of a pumpkin spice coffee run.”

Chasten closed his eyes as she talked. Pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses.

Amy’s voice grew quieter. Thoughtful. “It’s an unusual thing,” she mused, sitting down on the table again. For the first time she was near enough that Chasten noticed the scent of her perfume: strong, expensive, spicy. “Having that kind of a partnership with a spouse. High risk, high reward, I suppose. But you two are _ so _ fucking young, _ so _ fucking green, and it fucking _ shows _. If you can’t navigate the simple little trap I set for you, Trumpworld is going to devour you alive, and your unlikely little gay House of Cards is going to fall and bring the country down with it. Because try as he might, Chasten Buttigieg is no Claire Underwood.”

She traced the edges of the binder now with the pen, studiously looked down, then glanced up, waiting to see which one of them would protest first. Pete ran a hand through his freshly cut hair. “Lis?” he finally asked, tossing the name over his shoulder. He sounded so strange, so unfamiliar, when he was unsure.

“We’ll discuss this later,” Lis said. The tinge of fear in her voice sent another wave of sinking nausea through Chasten.

“So you knew,” Pete said, flatly. “Mike?”

“I - ” Mike said, after a long pause, but Amy interrupted.

“Oh, I’m willing to bet Schmuhl didn't know. In fact, there's a lot he probably doesn't know. Because you four silo information, don’t you? For plausible deniability, I suppose? That’s only going to work for as long as you trust each other. It would only take one betrayal for the paranoia to set in.”

She was pushing every button that Pete possessed with a gleeful, rapid-fire sadism. Chasten could feel his husband's patience unraveling. “Even if what you’re saying really happened,” Pete said, “and I’m not admitting that it did, you have no right to malign my staff or husband by insinuating - ”

“It’s true,” Chasten found himself saying, because he couldn’t bear the thought of Pete embarrassing himself any more.

He saw out of his peripheral vision Pete’s head snapping over to stare at him, his stare boring into his temple. In response he swallowed and leaned back and pressed his hands in his pockets and looked up at the cheap brass chandelier above them.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Pete muttered. He took a moment to absorb, to recalibrate. “So why are you telling me this, then? What do you want? An endorsement if I choke here?”

Her voice dripped with scorn. “Oh, please. You’re not going to choke here. The fact that you’re going to do so well in Iowa is the only reason I’m bothering with this conversation. Granted, neither of us will win outright. But we will over-perform.”

“So again,” Pete said through gritted teeth. “I ask you, what do you want?”

Chasten looked from the ceiling down to her face. She took a moment, weighing her options. She clicked her pen a few times. “I want to warn you,” she finally said. “I want to warn you to control your two-faced cheat of a husband, because I think he thinks he knows better than you. And if by some _ miracle _you win the nomination, I want you to know that he’s going to lose you - and the Party - the general.”

Her words stole Chasten’s breath. The blood in his body felt as if it was being replaced with fiery liquid fear - something akin to what he imagined dying by botched injection would feel like.

“But,” she said, and she paused for a moment for emphasis. “I also want to tell you to never, _ ever _fucking attack me, no matter how hard I go at you. Treat me with fucking kid gloves. Because you have no way of knowing what else I’m going to uncover about you. Or what I already have. And don’t think for one moment that I won’t use everything I’ve learned.”

She opened the binder. _ Opposition Research _, the first page read.

Pete struggled to ignore the power play, to cling to logic. “My path might be steep, but yours is fucking non-existent. Releasing anything about us isn’t going to help you.”

She gave a one-sided smile. It read like a mockery of Pete’s. “Chasten really _is_ the brains behind this operation, isn’t he?”

Pete glared.

“Chasten,” Amy said soothingly. "Dear." She clicked the pen again, slowly, spacing out the pressure and the release, making it crack twice, and then idly dragging it across the page. “Be a good boy and explain what I’m doing to your husband.”

Speaking was the last thing that Chasten felt capable of doing, but under her steely gaze he took a breath and obeyed. “If the moderate vote doesn’t consolidate behind a single candidate before Super Tuesday, Sanders wins. By default. It doesn't matter how well we campaign. The number of delegates he’s going to get out of California alone is - ”

“Well, obviously,” Pete interrupted, “but - ”

“And if the voters don’t consolidate... That means we’ll be doing this again in 2024.”

“Good boy,” Amy whispered. “Now explain why.”

Chasten closed his eyes a moment before answering. “Because Sanders likely loses the general.”

“And what happens on the off chance that Sanders _ wins _the general?” Amy asked.

Together the two of them had guided Pete to the precipice, and now Pete was staring over it himself. “If Sanders dies in office,” he realized, “we’ll be the front-runners to primary his VP.” He paused, trying to find a realistic way out of the nightmare. Chasten glanced over, sad for him suddenly, because there _ was _ no way out, no matter how many times those blue eyes flickered intensely back and forth. “God _ dammit _,” he finally said.

Amy leaned over the table. She interrupted Pete’s thoughts, touched the tip of his chin with the end of her pen, raised his whole face up to meet her stare. Chasten was too paralyzed by horror, too mesmerized by the boldness of the gesture, to move to defend him.

“We’re not playing for 2020,” she whispered. “We’re fighting for ‘24. And I will not allow you to step into that primary unbruised. Or the ‘28 primary, if it comes to that. Or the ‘32 primary, if it comes to _ that _ . Because we’re the young ones. The other idiots onstage this cycle - they're going to retire; they’re going to die. But you and me? Fifty-nine is the new thirty-eight. We’ll be competing for the rest of my career. And after all the blood and the sweat and the tears and the sacrifice and the _ sexism _…”

Suddenly her voice cracked. Chasten looked up from his lap, looked over at Pete looking up at her. Without breaking eye contact, pen still under his chin, Pete reached into his pocket and offered her a handkerchief, setting it on top of the binder between them.

“Oh, _ fuck _ you,” she said, letting out a breath of scorn. She leaned in closer, biting back the tears. Only a single one fell down to the page. “Play-acting nice doesn’t work with me, you little rat-faced bastard. No matter what you do, no matter how you try to win me over, I’m not going to just _ lay here and take it _ while the fucking mayor of South Bend, Indiana, fucks me over. Because I want a fucking _ chance _ next time around, do you hear me? A fucking _chance_. And if getting a fucking chance next time around means kneecapping you now, I will fucking kneecap you all day long until you’re fucking _ screaming _.”

Pete didn’t drop his eyes. “You’re playing a dangerous game,” he said. “This is the kind of shit that will re-elect Trump. And imagine what he'll do when he doesn’t need to think about re-election.” He swallowed; the pen bobbed a little at the motion of his chin. “I don’t think it’s unrealistic to assume that his political enemies will face criminal prosecution.”

Chasten stared. He had never heard Pete raise this possibility before.

“And if that happens,” Pete said, “every single person in this room will be in even more danger than we’re in now. And at that point…” He shrugged. “What will the primaries matter?”

Unexpectedly, Amy’s face curled into a smile. “Well-stated, Mayor,” she said. “A noble sentiment. So how about this? We both drop out. Together. Tomorrow morning. We issue a joint statement endorsing Biden and encouraging our supporters to caucus for him. Will you agree to that?”

“I - ” and Pete faltered.

“It would put Senator Sanders in a very difficult position.”

Pete struggled. Chasten’s heart sank.

Amy shook her head - laughed a little, bitterly. “Don’t think I don’t know how to call a bluff, Buttigieg.” She dropped the pen from his chin finally, and Pete let out a breath. “Interesting, though, isn’t it,” she mused, as she closed the binder, “that you were willing to sacrifice your life for your country...but not your career?”

“_Never_ assume you know what I will or won’t sacrifice,” Pete said, and the conviction with which he spoke made a chill run down Chasten’s spine.

She shook her head. “You think that you’re so far above the rest of us. That you live on some higher, purer moral plane. That a town hall on CNN is equivalent to a decade in the Senate. You aren’t, you don’t - and it fucking isn’t.”

She shook her head, straightened out her blazer, and tucked the binder under her arm. Then she picked up the handkerchief Pete had offered her and ripped it in two.

“Welcome to the big leagues,” she said, sliding the pieces across the table. “Only the sociopaths survive. And good boys never win.”

* * *

The four of them said nothing as they walked from the hotel ballroom to the elevator bank. Lis remained ensconced behind her sunglasses, fingernails tapping at her phone, offering no explanations. Mike had walked into the meeting on her arm; now he was walking behind her, head down, lost in thought. Pete’s face was expressionless, his motions stiff.

Chasten couldn’t bear their silence any longer. “We need to talk,” he finally said.

“No,” Pete said. “No talking.”

“But - ”

“I _ said _,” Pete said, hammering the elevator button ten too many times, “no talking.”

“But why?”

“Because this is psychological warfare.” He turned around, suddenly addressing all of them. “She wants us to fight; she wants me off my game for tonight. So whatever _ that _was…” He took a breath. “We compartmentalize the fuck out of it. Pretend it never happened. At least until after Iowa. And maybe later, depending. Is that clear?”

An elevator behind them dinged, but it was going the wrong direction. A cadre of reporters and cameramen assigned to the debate and carrying messenger bags and equipment tumbled out of the car. Their jokes and laughter sounded like a language that Chasten had forgotten how to speak.

“Then when _ can _we talk?” he asked, once the hall had emptied and they were alone again.

Pete didn’t look at him, just kept his eyes trained on the lit arrow above the elevator. “When one of these secret schemes fucking explodes in our fucking faces and we’re exiled to South Bend,” he said, his voice calm. “Then we’ll have all the time in the world to talk.” The quick, cutting glare that he flashed made the underside of Chasten’s collarbone burn with shame.

“Peter,” he said, desperately reaching out for his husband’s hand, trying to hold it, brushing his fingers along his wrist, along the watchband, a silent reminder to both of them, the symbolism of which Pete had chosen to forget, refused to even acknowledge. “I’m sorry; I just - I don’t - ” He started again. “I _ promised _.”

The elevator dinged before he could find any other words. Pete pulled his hand away.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Chasten said, and he didn't care that he was coming across as desperate.

Pete stepped into the elevator. “Maybe you already have,” he said, turning around, and Chasten stared at him. “I have an appointment with Mike to go over some delegate math. Give us half an hour. While we’re busy doing that, you two geniuses can brainstorm about what kind of mushy debate picture should go up on Twitter. I’ll text when we’re done.” The door started to close, but Pete pushed it back to hold it open for Mike. At the gesture, Mike’s shell shocked expression took on a sheen of dazed satisfaction, and he stepped past Chasten.

Pete stood in the dead center of the car, and his eyes disappeared between the closing silver doors.

Defeated, Chasten turned back to Lis. He opened his mouth to speak, to defend himself, but no words came out.

She understood. She sympathized, clearly. But she didn’t say what he wanted to hear: only what he kept thinking to himself, again and again and again:

_ “You said you’d do anything.” _

* * *

December 28, 2016 - Berlin, Germany

Pete was deeply, deeply in love; he knew that much. He also knew he was deeply in hate - deeply in suspicion - deeply in self-absorption - deeply in every tragic tendency his personality and his life experience had predisposed him to. And as they stood in silence before the majesty of the Brandenburg Gate, he found his jet-lagged mind fantasizing over desires he wished had stayed asleep in his subconscious. He dreamed of maneuvering the man beside him up against a wall, trapping him there, kissing the delicate point where his jaw met his neck - suddenly, unexpectedly, dramatically hurting him, somehow - and then gently, gently kissing every tear rolling down his face, comforting him, caressing him, apologizing to him, until the whimpering stopped. He wanted to give him everything, take it all away, then return it, and give him more.

He was horrified that, in the end, all his subconscious seemed to want was power.

He glanced at Chasten, at the lights of the Gate reflecting in his glasses. It was cold, dark, and late, and the crowds were beginning to drift away. Chasten had said on the walk over that this had been a place he’d often visited as an exchange student, that people-watching here had helped him discern his place in the world. Pete didn’t understand why they were there, or what they were waiting for exactly, but he waited quietly nevertheless. And he certainly couldn’t deny the thrill, the sheer crushing _ relief _, that the human part of him felt being at his ex’s side, after thinking he was gone forever. But - the betrayal, his lie about all he'd done, still stung.

Finally Chasten turned away from the lights. He looked over at Pete and into the darkness, with an expression as conflicted as the emotions Pete felt.

“When we were saying good-bye,” Chasten said with difficulty, “I said it wasn’t our time. I was wrong. It is our time.” He took a breath. “I’m not getting down on one knee, but - ”

The machinery of Pete’s mind clattered to a halt. _ Of course, _ he thought to himself, disgusted, wondering why he had expected anything else besides an obscene manipulation.

Chasten reached into his messenger bag, took out a jeweler’s box, and held it out. Against his will, Pete took it. His fingers trembled just slightly as he opened it. Inside was a watch. It was already ticking, and it was set to South Bend time.

“You’ll run for President,” Chasten said. “America will fall in love with you, and you’ll win. And if you take this watch, I promise to stand beside you every step of the way.”

“I - ” _ I can’t _, he couldn’t say.

Chasten understood. “I know you don’t want to get married. I don’t blame you. And if you _ never _ want to get married, I’ll _ never _blame you. But at least let me be whatever you need to win this race.”

“What do you mean?” he said. But he already somehow knew what he meant, and the thought made him feel dizzy.

“If you want to offer me an official position in the campaign, I’ll take it. If you want me to buy you a new wardrobe - to help you with debate prep - to make deals with your opponents behind your back... I’ll do it. If you want me to be your secret lover, I will climb drainpipes to get into your bed. If you want me to play your adoring Jackie Kennedy, I will throw my career away and I will plan the wedding.”

Pete looked up from the watch. Chasten kept going.

“If you need to marry someone better, I will work with Mike. I will find you someone better; I will coach him; I will help him be whoever he needs to be for you. I will watch over the children you raise with him, and I will make sure they’re always safe and loved. Yes, I will pine for you every single day of the rest of my fucking life, but I swear to God that you’ll never notice once.”

It felt as if the very stars above were shifting.

“And if you ever need to be humanized, if you ever make a mistake and need a salacious media distraction, then I will seduce; I will cheat; I will homewreck; I will become the villain of your presidency for you. I will _ orchestrate _scandal.”

Pete reached out a hand, somehow instinctively knowing that he would remember the next sentence for the rest of his life, and wanting a hand to hold as he heard it.

“I will take every note, I will play any part, for the rest of my life, no questions asked, if you let me love you, if you let me help you win.”

The poetry, the boldness of the gesture felt like an ecstatic knife to the heart. “That was never, _ever_ the plan,” he breathed.

The expression on Chasten’s face hardened. “It’s a risk for me. Which is proof that it’s real.”

Pete struggled. Finally - “No,” he said, but he sounded uncertain. “No. Just come back; don’t tempt me with preconditions that you can’t - that I can’t - ”

“No, that’s the thing,” Chasten said, voice rising. “I fucking _ need _ those preconditions. You’ll choose me now, but… It won’t last. It _ can’t _last. Without preconditions, you’ll give up politics to protect me, to be the fucking knight in shining armor. Then someday we’ll be driving home from some god-awful soul-sucking McKinsey Christmas party, and I’ll glance across our fancy car at your face, and you’ll say, ‘I made a mistake,’ and I’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.”

“Stop it.”

He bit his tongue as he said the words. The phrase _ stop it _ was a tell: a tell that whoever he was talking to had strayed too close to unwanted, unvarnished truth. Chasten knew this; he clearly felt the balance of power shifting in his direction, and he dove ahead. “You _ will _,” Chasten insisted. “You know you will. If you throw away your dream for me, our whole life together will turn into one long what-if.”

Pete didn’t know what to say to that. He looked between the watch and Chasten’s face. The conviction written on his features scared him a little.

“If you left me - _ ever _\- it would have been better for me if I’d died on that plane. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said immediately - because now he understood being left too well.

“So I’ll come back. But only if you use me for what you’ve always wanted. You have to trust that I can fix everything, even if it might mean me giving up everything; I - ”

The side of him pretending to be human interrupted. “That’s not a love story. That’s a human sacrifice.”

Chasten’s voice turned miserably wistful. “When someone loves a man like you, aren’t they one and the same?”

Pete had no answer to that. The watch box wasn’t the watch’s at all, he realized; it was Pandora’s. Nevertheless, he felt himself magnetized to its heartbeat-like tick, to the hands’ steady motion forward, to the South Bend time, the time that was home’s: the time that, even thousands of miles away, his body still was stuck on.

Chasten leaned in. He pressed words against Pete’s ear. “No other candidate would have this advantage,” he whispered. “No other candidate has _ ever _had this advantage.”

He realized that his power to resist had drained from him, like a car battery in the cold. They had an ultimate, magnetic inevitability - they always, always had - and he had gotten too tired to fight it. “What would we tell Mike and Lis?” he found himself asking, as if the deal was already done.

“That I thought that I was going to die,” Chasten said. “I knew you weren’t ready for marriage. But I needed to let you know that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. So I went out to buy you this watch, to - ”

“ - To give me time,” he finished.

He wavered for a minute. He looked up at his face, at the breeze ruffling single strands of Chasten's hair. Then finally he fell into saying yes, melting at the romance and poetry of the lie, and they took a moment there together in the dark and the lights of the Gate, and he kissed him.

* * *

February 6, 2020 - Manchester, New Hampshire

As he put on his tie, he stared at the green room mirror, watching Chasten’s reflection behind his own. He couldn’t keep his mind from drifting back to another CNN town hall.

_ “I always love seeing you two together. I think of you as the bridge candidates. Uniting the party. Would you like a coffee? If you like pumpkin spice, you can take mine.” _

_ Amy, smiling: “When I win, I’m appointing you First Gentleman.” _

_ Chasten, grave: “I’m afraid I can’t settle for less than Secretary of State.” _

It was a useless train of thought. Pete re-focused his attention on the knot at his throat. “I’ve been thinking about Perez calling on the IDP to do a recanvass,” he finally said. It was the first thing he’d said to Chasten all afternoon, and he thought it might get a reaction. It didn’t.

“Mm,” Chasten said, leaning against the wall, distracted, scrolling through his phone.

“During our DNC run… You were the one in charge of all the contact information.”

“Yes.”

“You were the one who saved every name, every number, every email address…”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew that we…” He started again. “Because I knew that you had a future.”

Pete turned around. Chasten was usually the one to smooth out his tie, but he did it now himself. “It certainly would be convenient for the campaign if a recanvass request doesn’t come from us. It would keep our hands clean.”

“If you say so.”

Chasten’s inattention was driving him mad. He took a step forward. “And that video of the homophobe at the caucus,” he continued. “How she didn’t even notice a phone in her face. How the video was just the _ perfect _length for talk shows and Twitter engagement. How our precinct captain was a fucking saint, with her fucking doe-eyed child right next to her…”

“Mm.”

“Nice touch having the homophobe wearing Amy buttons, by the way. Subtle, but effective.”

He kept stepping forward, slowly but surely, until they were almost forehead to forehead. When Chasten realized how close he was, he glanced up. “You need more sleep,” he said, unmoved by his proximity.

Pete didn’t understand where his rage was coming from. He didn’t care. He snatched the phone from Chasten’s hand, tossed it on the couch, careful not to look at what secrets the screen might hold, and pushed Chasten’s elbow up against the wall, trapping him.

“Chasten,” he breathed. “If I’m going to win this, I have to be the one to do it. It's my name on the ballot, not ours. If any of that was you, or if you’ve done anything else you haven’t told me about, for the love of God, don’t tell me. But you have to swear to me you'll fucking _ stop _it. Forget Berlin. Forget Berlin right fucking now.”

Chasten’s phone pinged. He squirmed - Pete let him go, reluctantly - and picked up his phone again.

But he kept talking. “Because this can only go on for so long. Because one of these days it’s all going to backfire; it’s all going to come out; and at that point - ”

“You just won Iowa,” Chasten said.

He understood the words individually - _you_ and _just_ and _won_ and _Iowa_ \- but strung together they made no sense. “What?”

“You just won Iowa. One hundred percent of precincts reporting. 26.2% to 26.1%.”

Pete grabbed the phone. He scrolled through the numbers, the candidates, the counties, the precincts.

He heard Chasten talking, voice sounding so distant he might as well have been calling from another world.

“2000. Al Gore. 2004. John Kerry. 2008, 2012. Barack Obama. 2016. Hillary Clinton. 2020. Pete Buttigieg.” He paused. “Peter. If history holds… You’re going to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.”

“I - ” and he felt as if he was drowning mid-flight and flying mid-swim.

He looked up from the phone. The man in front of him had the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. He was the man who had taught him how to love: the man who had patiently, ruthlessly carved his vulnerabilities into his strengths. He was the man who he’d made a vow before God over, to comfort and to honor and to keep for the rest of his life. He was the man he’d be trapped with forever: the other half of his broken self that he could never, ever escape. “You son of a bitch,” he said, feeling hot tears prick at the corners of his eyes, and he put his hands on Chasten’s face. “Keep your hands off my fucking election; I - _ I _ \- ” and he curled his fingers to helplessly dig nails into Chasten’s skin, as Chasten, grimly smiling, used one hand to wrap around the band of his watch, and the other to reach out to smooth the silk blue tie down his chest.

* * *

_“He's been a partner in this whole thing, and I quite simply couldn’t do it without him.”_ \- Pete Buttigieg, [CNN New Hampshire town hall](https://youtu.be/FO5DZyRRYFA), February 6, 2020


	20. January 21, 2017 - South Bend, Indiana

“A strategy is not a fixed recipe. The key in all strategic wargames is the adaptation. The risk map changes quickly and even every turn can be a different situation which requires other moves. The best strategy for every game doesn’t exist and must always evolve. You can not win every game with the same strategy. Every game or every situation is different, and you need to think about the best counter to get back in control.”

Pete and Chasten sat opposite Mike and Lis on the living room couches. A game of Risk was painstakingly laid out on the coffee table between them; the crackling fire was ablaze; and Truman was sighing beside them, content and oblivious. Outside, the dreary winter days were just starting to lengthen. They hinted at the possibility of an inevitable and incipient spring.

There were four glasses and a bottle of whiskey on the coffee table. Pete’s was the only glass still untouched. He’d been too busy reading websites aloud and discoursing on the strategy of the game to remember to drink.

“Jesus Christ,” Lis said. She wavered toward Mike’s shoulder before collapsing on the couch back. “I’m dizzy and drunk as balls and I still understand this is a metaphor for a presidential campaign. Let’s just play the fucking game, Pete. We’ll teach each other as we go.”

Pete ignored her and kept scrolling through his phone. Chasten wondered whether he’d even heard her. “That’s from ultraboardgames.com,” Pete informed them, on the off-chance they cared. “There’s also a Wikihow page…” He trailed off, furrowing his brow as he read.

Chasten tipped back another glass of whiskey. “Am I allowed to say I wish I’d died in the plane crash?”

“Yes,” Mike said, too quickly, and Chasten glanced a glare at him.

There was a moment of silence. To Chasten’s surprise, Pete ended up being the one to break it.

“Well,” Pete said. He set down his phone, took the rules, and neatly folded them and put them away in the box. “Then…”

Chasten looked at him, wondering if what he thought was happening was actually happening.

It was. “Then I wouldn’t be wearing such a handsome watch, would I?”

_ I can’t lie _ , Pete had said earlier in their bedroom, after Chasten had suggested a plan of how to get what they both wanted - what they both needed - what the campaign needed. _ I can’t lie to Mike. I can’t lie to anyone. I can’t even lie to you. _

Chasten had walked up behind him, wrapped his arms around his waist, and looked at their reflections in the dresser mirror. _ You’re not lying; you’re curating, _ he’d said. And then, the coup de grâce: _ Presidents have to learn how to lie for the greater good _, and even as he’d said the words he felt Pete melting beneath his touch.

Chasten sank into the clueless character he knew he needed to play. “Peter,” he said, making sure to sound a touch scandalized.

Mike and Lis stared back and forth between both of them. After a moment of uncertainty, Lis leaned forward and poured herself another glass.

“None of what you just said made any sense,” she said, “so I’m going to get drunker.”

Pete ignored her and looked at Chasten instead. “Before we start the game, there’s something we want to say,” he said. He was playing the role he’d been told to play, and he was pulling it off, and as he did he was making a heat burn low in the pit of Chasten’s stomach. “Do you want to tell the story, love?” he asked. Then, pointedly: “You’re the storyteller.”

“Always,” Chasten said, automatically and without preconditions. He took a moment, weighing his words and how to best deliver them: when to insert pauses and articulations and emphases. “When I thought the plane was about to crash, I thought about how...devastating it would be…”

And suddenly he wasn’t playing a role anymore. The fine line between act and reality began blurring, diffusing. Now everything he could remember was real.

“I thought about how devastating it would be to not share the rest of my life with Peter, and...not being able to see everything that I knew he’d be able to accomplish...” _ With your help _ , his brain urged; _ they’ll be easier to manipulate if you say “with your help.” _“With your help,” his lips echoed.

Mike and Lis kept staring.

He went on. “But I also know that there are…” He hesitated. “People in Peter’s life who love him, too, who have loved him for longer than I have, who are genuinely looking out for him, and who don’t trust me. And for good fucking reason.”

Lis rested her chin on Mike’s shoulder and stage-whispered into his ear. “I think he’s talking about you.” Mike didn’t bother pushing her away, but he did reach across her lap and move the whiskey just out of her reach.

“And because those people have good fucking reason not to trust me, I’m not going to propose. If we ever get married, it’ll be in the future, and it’ll be Pete who asks me. When he’s ready. Once I’ve proven my loyalty. But until then…” He took a breath. “I gave him that watch. To let him know I’ll always be here. To give him time.”

As Chasten spoke, Pete absentmindedly pushed up his sleeve an inch, exposing the watch, affectionately brushing the ticking face with his hand. Chasten couldn’t tell if the gesture was unconscious or deliberate. He didn’t have time to wonder if it mattered.

“Well,” Lis said, sitting upright again. “_ That _ goes in the fucking memoir.”

Chasten found himself smiling at the idea. He pushed on. “So, Mike,” he said, “I know it sounds silly, but I’ve changed. I’ve grown. I’m never going to run away again, I’m done lying and I’m savvy enough to deal with any fallout that comes our way. So if you could just give me a chance to prove myself, to prove my love and my loyalty to this man we both love…” He licked his lips, a little lost for words. “We...”

Pete saved him. “What he’s saying is, we’d like you to reconsider running the campaign,” he said. “We want you in more than just an advisory role. We both want you at the top. Chasten wants it because I want it. Because you and I have a history. And Mike, there’s no one else I trust more on this earth.”

Mike leaned back. He was smart enough to say no, but bombarded by a million emotions telling him to say yes.

Those emotions were Mike's weakness, and Chasten felt the door opening. “Trump has been in office a day,” he said. “Twenty-four fucking hours. And everything we care about is already going to hell. God only knows what America’s going to look like after four years of this. Won’t the country deserve someone like Peter to rebuild? If he’s going to try - ”

“And I _ will _be trying,” Pete interrupted. He leaned back imperiously, whiskey glass in hand, chin tilted down just slightly in a smug posture of superiority, and Chasten was overwhelmed by pride.

“As soon as he gets the publicity boost and the press contacts from the DNC run, he’ll start positioning himself for 2020. And it’s going to be the fucking hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He needs someone who he can trust, since he can’t - trust me.” He was surprised that his voice only cracked a little admitting it out loud. “I never beg, as a rule. But I’m begging you. I promised him I’d be here for him. For the long haul.” He indulged in an artfully timed pause. “Please, do us the honor of being there, too.”

Mike looked back and forth between them as Lis smiled over her glass - and in that moment Chasten began to breathe easier, because he realized it had worked, and they had won.

“So what do you say?” Pete asked. “Will you join us?” He smiled his one-sided smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle. His tone grew cheeky. Mischievous. “Granted, it’s audacious, but I think the four of us could rewrite all the rules. And maybe even win.”

Pete extended his hand out over the game, waiting. The shadow cast against the wall rippled in the flickering light of the fire.

Mike hesitated.

Lis raised an expectant eyebrow.

Chasten bit his lip.

“Peter,” Mike finally said, “your boyfriend is a dangerous, self-centered, manipulative bastard, but yes,” and he glanced sideways at Lis, reached out his hand, and shook on the deal.

* * *

February 24, 2020 - Charleston, South Carolina

Chasten sat opposite Mike and Lis on the hotel suite couches. A game of delegate math was painstakingly laid out on the coffee table between them; CNN was broadcasting, volume turned low; and out in the hall they could hear the murmurs of straggling journalists and staffers, content and oblivious. Outside was nothing but darkness, punctuated by the golden light of the street lamps scattered across the parking lot.

Pete was sick, and it was past two in the morning, so they’d ordered him to the bedroom down the hall. Chasten wished Pete was still there, so he could reach out for his hand as he read the latest polls, heart sinking. Chasten was very grateful Pete wasn’t there, so he wouldn’t be tempted to reach out for his hand as they read the latest polls, hearts sinking.

The three of them had been quiet for a long while, letting the defeated turning of pages and the resigned shuffling of binders speak for themselves. The possibility that they were nearing the end of their madcap adventure had been obvious since Nevada. But what they’d all lived through together had been such a deliriously frenetic fairy-tale, so real and so unreal simultaneously, the fact that it was all coming to a close in a nondescript hotel suite in South Carolina seemed so crushingly...ordinary: maybe even false, somehow.

Mike seemed to be reading his mind. “Do you remember where we started?” he asked. Much to Chasten’s irritation, he was already sounding nostalgic.

“I do,” Lis said. She took a final swig of her last Bud Lite. “And I’m not sure if remembering makes this moment worse or better.”

Chasten felt his eyes still flickering over the papers, madly skimming for a way out. If they were going to admit defeat here, now, he felt a loyalty to Peter to be the last one to give up.

But finally he had to, because there was no way out.

“Klobuchar was right,” he said. “This isn’t about ‘20 anymore. It’s about ‘24. And ‘28. And ‘32.” He sighed and set down the folders. “We have to kill this campaign to save Pete.” A pensive hesitance. “Fuck, we have to kill this campaign to save the _ country _.”

Mike straightened out his pile of papers. “Well,” he said. “Unlike some people here, Pete actually listens to reason.” He glanced down at the floor, eyes suddenly sad, clearly imagining that conversation. “Once I show him these numbers… He’ll do what’s right. He always does.”

Chasten’s voice was quiet. “But what if he doesn’t?”

Lis cackled. “Are you kidding? That fucker would wear a suit of armor and commute to work on a white horse if he could. You know better than any of us how he’s going to get off on this.”

Chasten noticed he was picking at the edge of his thumbnail. He realized that over the past five years, Pete’s quirks had melted into his and his into Pete’s, and he had trouble remembering now whose were originally whose. “I think…” he said, and he stopped, and he started again. “I think he might be scared.”

“Pete doesn’t get scared,” Mike said, suddenly defensive. “And he’s no idiot. He knows that if he leaves this race right, he could have ten more chances. But he has to stick the landing first.”

Chasten took a breath to say something, then stopped when the words got trapped on his tongue. He pressed his fingertips and palms together, leaning forward, elbows on his knees.

Lis looked at him, noticing something for the first time. “Chasten,” she said. “What are you talking about?” When he didn’t answer right away - when the burn of fear in his chest made it a struggle to speak - she asked again. Her unexpected gentleness stopped him in his tracks. “What do you think Pete’s scared of?”

Chasten could see there was no good time to say it, so he just went and said it, with no preamble. “I think he’s afraid I won’t love him anymore,” he said.

Mike and Lis both froze, and in their silence Chasten could hear everything at once: distant unintelligible voices from the elevator bank, a suddenly loud TV in the next room over, a bathtub draining in the floor above, the quiet huff of his own emotional breath in his tightening throat.

“And I...” he said, and he could feel in his very soul how his heartbeat was racing, hot and panicked. “Honestly, I’m not sure if he’ll love me, either. We could be looking at the end of a campaign _ and _our marriage; that’s a lot for both of us to - ”

“You’re insane,” Mike interrupted. “You’re fucking insane, right?”

“I - ”

Lis reached out for Mike’s hand. He pushed it away. “You tied your motherfucking marriage to whether he won or lost an election? Really? What the hell is wrong with you? What kind of _ sociopath _\- ”

Lis made another try for his hand; this time she succeeded in quieting him. “Mike. Shut the fuck up,” she said before turning to look across the table. Then, accusingly: “What the hell, Chasten?”

This was never a story he intended to tell them. He felt himself floundering. “You should know something about how we started all this,” he said, eventually. “We didn’t tell you the whole story behind the watch. We knew we needed a sweet simple love story to… To keep you here. Because I didn’t know if the more complicated truth would have. Yes, Pete needed Mike. But he needed me, too. So we told a story; we did what we - ”

“Jesus Christ,” Mike muttered.

Chasten kept talking over him, growing increasingly desperate. “We did what we had to do to get what we wanted. But the watch wasn’t _ just _ a proposal. It was a promise of...partnership. It was a promise symbolizing how far I’d go to help him win this. Help him get what he's always wanted. What I’d be willing to sacrifice. How cutthroat I’d be. Who I’d be willing to manipulate. Who I’d be willing to lie to. And that ended up being everyone from you to Peter to myself.” He bit his lip. “We mixed up the love and the work, and we did it from the very first time we talked, and… I know it was dangerous, and I _ knew _it was dangerous, but honestly I don’t know if we would have fallen in love if it had gone any other - ”

“That isn’t fucking _ love _ , Chasten,” Mike said, and Chasten winced at the unadulterated disgust in his voice. “If what you’re saying is true, you’ve never loved Peter. Not _ really _ , not _ him _. You’ve just loved what he could do for you. You’ve just loved the chance to show off, to win your goddamn power games, to play in the sandbox with the big boys.” He took a moment, as if trying to contain the shake in his voice now rapidly spreading to his shoulders. “That man deserved so much better than you, you piece of - ”

For the first time he could remember, Chasten’s voice was calmer than Mike’s: low with emotion, ready to break with regret.

“He deserved better than any of us,” Chasten said.

Mike was taken aback by the admission, and he clearly agreed with it, but he also couldn’t bear to acknowledge that he did. He recalled a memory instead. “You know, when Pete got off that first FaceTime conversation with you, I told him. I told him exactly: ‘You didn’t like him as a person. You liked him as a thing to use.’ I saw it. I saw the entire dynamic in his fucking eyes, and from Day Fucking One I _ knew _\- ”

“Well,” Chasten said, interrupting. He felt his face going cold and pale. Every time that Pete had told him the story of that first conversation, he’d always left that snippet of dialogue out. _ It’s called curating _, his subconscious echoed unhelpfully. He wondered what else he didn’t know, and if it would change what he thought about what he did. “Good for you, Mike,” he said. “You were right. I hope that you and your satisfaction are very happy together.” He didn’t know what else to say.

There was another uneasy silence. Lis used the opportunity to unzip her boots and toss them aside. “Chasten,” she said, eventually. “Look at me.”

He looked at her. The sight of her was blurry and tinged with tears and foggy through the lenses of his glasses.

She asked him a simple question that he had no simple answer to. “Do you love him?”

“Of _ course _ I do, in _ some _ way," he said. "It’s just…” He tried again. “We built everything we had on this campaign, and now that we won’t have it, I don’t - I don’t know if I’m worth - or what I can give - ” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Or what it would look like between us if… _ Once _we’ve failed. I don’t know what we’ll have left. I don’t know what we’ll be.”

Lis leaned forward, extending an open palm on the pile of papers between them: a rare invitation to comfort that she was clearly offering with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. “You didn’t ask for my advice so I’m going to give it. First off,” she said, tossing a glare to her right, “don’t listen to Mike. I think we’d both agree that, as much as I love him, Mike’s instincts are fucking horseshit.” Then, quickly: “No offense.”

“Fuck you,” Mike muttered.

“Maybe later. Look, I know why you’d doubt yourself, Chasten. I know why you’d doubt Pete. Fuck, I know why you’d doubt _ love _ . All we’ve ever done is curate and obfuscate and objectify you, and package up your relationship for consumption, and let people think you’re sweet and soft-spoken and submissive, when in reality you’re savvy and dominant and fucking brilliant. And it’s a shame you’ll never get the credit you deserve for that, because those are just the rules of this goddamn game. I am _ so sorry _ that hiding who you are was the only way you two even had a chance at winning this. It’s not fair. It never has been.” She took a breath. “But. I know two things. I know love, and I know stories. Your love isn’t a story. You love him. You love Peter with every ounce of your twisted, broken, fucked-up heart, Chasten. You have to believe me.”

There were tears now on his lashes: tears that, for some reason, he didn’t trust. “But if _ he _doesn’t believe me, does it really matter?”

Lis pulled back her hand, her offer of comfort rescinded. “Well, then, you idiot,” she said, “fucking make him believe it. You know him, and you know how to sell a story. _ So go fucking sell him a story _.”

Her words had the air of some kind of cynical benediction at the end of a sermon. Chasten rubbed his face with his hands.

“You do understand...” she said, clearly trying her best to sound gentle through gritted teeth. “If Pete lets his fear of losing you keep him from getting out at the right time…” She let this apocalyptic scenario dangle in the air for a heart-piercing moment. “You’ll be the one responsible for destroying everything he’s ever worked for.”

“So we have to convince him to save himself,” Chasten said, pushing past the tightness in his throat, “by sacrificing himself.”

“Pretty much.”

Mike jumped in again. His eyes were still burning cold. “Not ‘we’, Chasten,” he said. “If losing you is what he’s really scared of, _ we _are not convincing him to sacrifice himself. That part’s on you.”

At that, they dropped into a joint reverie. Chasten found himself wondering if he’d ever be so attuned to another group of people again. The idea he might not be made the loss all the harder.

He felt an instinct that they were both waiting for him to take the lead in verbalizing what they all were thinking.

After a while, he did.

“If these polls hold...” he said. He took a moment to gather himself, until he sounded authoritative. “Get Biden on the phone. Have him ask Peter to drop. And if Biden can’t get him to drop…” He took a moment to close his eyes, wishing his eighteen-year-old self could hear the words he was about to say. “Get the Clintons. Get Obama. Get Carter. Fuck, get them all, just in case. Peter might not listen to us. But he’ll listen to them. He’ll have to.”

“Sure,” Lis said. “But let’s not sell him short, either.” She withdrew a Moleskin journal from the handbag at her side and opened up to the end. “What would Pete want, you think?” she asked, clicking her pen, ready to transcribe. “In a Biden administration?”

Chasten hesitated. He looked at Mike, who looked away, because Mike had no more insight into this question than Chasten did, and he didn’t want to admit it. So Chasten took a moment to think. He thought about all of Pete’s late nights and early mornings at the mayor’s office - all of the dog-eared books stacked in their house about the theory and practice of effective government - even the shine in his eyes when someone asked him about infrastructure. Chasten realized that he hadn’t, until this moment, fully appreciated the beauty of Peter’s love for the mundanely necessary.

“He wants to be useful,” Chasten finally said.

Lis brushed off Pete’s devotion to country, as Chasten himself had when he’d seen the first signs of it five years ago. “Yeah, yeah. But beyond the politician bullshit. State? UN ambassador? VP? Special advisor on wastewater? What?”

“Just…” He struggled. “To be useful.”

Lis sighed.

“We’ve told a lot of stories, Lis,” he said. His voice trembled a little in its desperation to impart sincerity. “But Peter’s caring about the world… That has never, _ ever _been a story.”

Lis stared at him, pen in hand hovering over the journal, willing to break him to get at the truth - but there was nothing there to break, because he was telling the truth. “Fuck, I’m going to miss your wholesomeness,” she finally said, tucking the journal away, and the thought of being apart from Lis long enough to be missed by her stung Chasten’s raw heart in a way he hadn’t expected it would.

Mike leaned back against the corner of the couch, tucking his hands thoughtfully behind his head. “You know…” he said. “If Pete does drop first…” He paused, glancing at them both and gaming out the possibilities. “_ And _ we spin it right…”

Lis immediately picked up the baton of the thought and raced forward with it. “He’d look like the white knight,” she said.

“The selfless savior of the Democratic party.”

“The selfless savior of liberal democracy.”

Chasten leaned forward and deliberated for a long moment. “Tell Biden that Pete wants three things,” he said eventually. “First, a discussion about a job in the administration.” Then, more to himself than anybody: “I think we could work with that.”

“Oh, we could absolutely work with that,” Lis said.

Chasten took one of the polls from the coffee table, leaned back, and began to slowly tear it into pieces as he mused aloud. “Second, a fucking binder thrown at Klobuchar’s campaign. Tell Biden to tell Obama to put it out of its misery.”

“Jesus, Chasten,” Mike muttered.

Chasten looked at him with the same imperious gaze that Pete had used to such great effect three years earlier, never once stopping his ripping of the paper. “I said what I said. But. Only after we drop. The timing on this is going to be everything. Then third, insist on an endorsement event.” He stopped ripping and started thinking. “Separate from Amy.” The wheels turned. “Outside.”

It was as if he’d pitched a metaphorical tennis ball across the net to Lis. “Short,” she answered immediately.

“Intimate.”

“Informal.”

“Emotional,” he said, and for a brief moment he felt a sad, satisfied smile flicker across his face. “Cut us all to the goddamn bone. Remind Peter of his father. Fuck, make Biden think of Beau.”

Mike’s voice was quiet. “Of Joe playing with your kids in the Oval.”

Chasten’s lungs froze, unable to push out old breath or take in new. Mike looked away, pretending he hadn’t been the one to speak. Lis’s fingertip flew up to her face to brush away an eyelash, but clearly she was just taking care of a tear. He felt naked suddenly: how transparent had his frantic desperation to find more family to love been?

But there was no time to wonder. Lis was already moving on. “Well,” she said, “it’s certainly not the ending I would have chosen, but…” She shrugged then laughed a little at the absurdity, helpless. “If these are the cards we were going to be dealt… I can’t imagine a better way to play them.”

The word _ ending _made Chasten feel suddenly, strangely disconnected from the scene he was participating in, like he was somehow being pulled out of his own story. “So you’ll do it?” he asked.

“We’ll do it,” Lis said, and he was overcome with gratitude. “But,” she said, warning him. “We’re not letting you in on this. Your fingerprints can’t be on it. And we’re the ones in charge of the campaign. You’re the one in charge of Pete.”

“Turns out there’s a difference,” Mike said dryly.

What Lis said next were the last words of the campaign directed solely at him, and they all knew they were, and she only said them with great difficulty. “You have to tell him what you both should have known all along,” she said. Somehow the tone of her voice took on every shade of every possible attitude: pity, regret, painfully out-of-character sincerity. She was a complicated woman, and he and Peter were complicated men. “I wish you good fucking luck. Truly I do.”

* * *

After he left the suite, Chasten walked down the long lonely corridor, pensive gaze lost in the pattern of the hotel carpet. He couldn’t yet bring himself to see Pete asleep and sick and vulnerable, so he ducked into the dingy alcove with the ice and vending machines to buy himself a few more minutes. He could feel the dark blue light of the Pepsi logo glowing neon on his face, and the heat of the air from the machines’ vents.

He felt desperately hungry but had no appetite. Nevertheless he took a step sideways and dragged his eyes up and down the snacks and candies on display. Finally he dug in his pocket and used the last two dollar bills he had left to buy Peter a package of peanut butter cups. He’d tuck them in his luggage, he decided, so he’d have at least one tiny thing to smile about once they got back home.

_ Your love isn’t a story. You love him, _he remembered involuntarily as the tiny spiraling arm in the vending machine unlooped and his selection dropped down with a hard thud.

He was careful entering their room, sliding the key card as slowly and quietly as possible. But as soon as he pushed open the door, he could tell through the bright sliver that something was wrong.

“Babe?” he asked.

There was no response. He took a few cautious steps forward past their suitcases until he could see around the corner to the bed. Pete was sitting, propped up by white pillows, surrounded by paperwork and pens and the detritus of illness: a Kleenex box, a half-empty bottle of cough syrup, a cool damp rag draped over the edge of the ice bucket. He must have woken up after a short sleep, because his contacts were still on the bathroom counter and he was wearing the beaten-up pair of backup glasses he’d owned for as long as Chasten had known him.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Chasten said.

“I did sleep. For a while.” He looked up over his papers and yawned. “Just waiting for the cough meds to kick in now.” His smile was warm, sleepy, disoriented. “Hi, by the way.”

Chasten stared at his living, breathing work ethic of a husband. “Hi,” he said, and Pete placidly went back to his papers.

They said nothing as Chasten changed. As he pulled back the sheets to slip in beside him, Chasten had the thought that he should keep his distance just in case he’d get sick, too. But then he realized - it didn’t matter anymore. It just didn’t matter. If he got infected now, by the time he actually became symptomatic, they’d be home again. So he took the risk and rested his chin on Pete’s shoulder, feeling the unnaturally hot warmth radiating in waves from the skin of his cheek.

Chasten glanced down and realized with a sinking heart that Pete wasn’t studying his debate prep binder.

“So. You guys looked over the polling, too?” Pete’s attempt at casualness verged on painful. Chasten could feel Pete’s shoulders clench as he fought to swallow back a cough, which he did.

Again, Chasten didn’t know exactly what to say. “Yes,” he allowed.

In the run-up to this debate, Pete had agreed not to waste time on polling or delegate math unless asked. He hadn’t been asked. So he knew he was disobeying orders, and he waded into the subject tentatively. “What did you think?”

Chasten punted. “I think if you have to read, you should read something else.”

“Too late,” Pete said.

Chasten sighed. “It is,” and he realized his words meant two things.

“The path is narrow.”

“Yes,” Chasten allowed again.

“But if we can just hang on long enough to push the others out…” Pete turned a page. “Narrow paths, maybe, but this whole thing has been a narrow path.”

The phrase “this whole thing” also seemed like it could mean two things. Chasten said nothing.

“What do you think?” A moment of silence. He tried again. “What were you planning?”

The burn radiating off Pete’s face was suddenly too much. Chasten rolled over, fluffed his own pillow. “What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging on the well-worn cloak of the clueless character he needed to play to keep the peace.

“Well,” Pete said. He took off his glasses and set them on the bedside table. He reached out an expectant hand. Chasten took off his own and handed them over. “You seem to think it was part of your wedding vows to go behind my back to get me elected.”

“I’m not going behind your back to get you elected,” Chasten said.

Pete’s tone was careful. “Why would you stop now?”

“Because you asked me to stop in Iowa.”

Pete fell silent, pushing back a little into the pillows. Chasten could tell, by the fidgeting hands and restlessly darting eyes exactly the moral dilemma his husband was wrestling with. He knew he couldn’t do anything more than silently watch it play out. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

Chasten took Pete’s hand and started grazing a thumb against the top of his palm. Pete’s fingers melted and curled around his. “Look, Peter,” Chasten said. His voice was hoarse. “I’m a storyteller, not an election rigger. There’s only so much I could have done.” He stopped moving his fingers and just squeezed instead. “We just ran out of time. That’s all.”

“No,” Pete said. “We can keep going; we can…”

Chasten closed his eyes tight, then opened them again. “Peter,” he said, and he tried to make the two syllables say everything he needed to say.

And at that, the very foundations of their world seemed to shift.

“We played the game and we lost it,” Chasten said. “But… It was close. It was _ so _ damn close. Maybe if the app hadn’t fucked up Iowa… Maybe if Bloomberg hadn’t declared… Maybe if Amy hadn’t won the New Hampshire debate…” He trailed off, overwhelmed suddenly by the number of paths not taken, the coinflips lost. “Change just one thing about this race, and it’s very possible you could have won the nomination. Which is more than Delaney can say. You can go home fucking proud.” He realized, too late, that he’d said _ you _ and not _ we _. Apparently he didn’t trust where home was. He held on to Pete’s hand even tighter.

“It’s too early to go home. If we can just hang on long enough, there _ will _ be dropouts; there _ will _be consolidation; and we have the best argument why it should be around us.”

Chasten hesitated. “You promised me you’d always tell me the truth in bed,” he said.

There was a long silence. Finally Pete pulled his hand back. “I thought you knew me,” he said, and his voice was small and focused and tight and defiant.

“I do know you,” Chasten said, frustrated. “I know you better than you know yourself.”

“Then why the fuck would you bring up the New Hampshire debate?”

Chasten sighed. He was right, of course. He knew how haunted Pete had been by his tentative performance there. But Chasten was so exhausted, so weary, so utterly worn to the bone, he’d forgotten to lie.

“If you really knew me, you know I’ll be dreaming about that fucking debate until the day I fucking die,” Pete said. “You don’t need to go rubbing it in like that.”

“That wasn’t what I - ”

Pete talked over him. Silenced him. “What if I’d said this? What if I’d said that? What if you’d been the one onstage?” His voice grew bitter. “Thing is, you would have done a better job. Because you have everything I don’t. A heart. Passion. You’re more lovable than I am. You always have been. Always will be.”

“Peter - ”

“And that was the problem in the end, wasn’t it? I didn’t learn to fake it all fast enough. I didn’t learn my part. I didn’t…” He took a moment. Chasten’s heart hurt too much to interrupt him. “I failed,” he finally said. “I failed my country. I failed _ you _.”

Chasten looked up at Pete’s silhouette, backlit by the light of the hotel lamp. He was suddenly moved: unspeakably, tragically moved. To this man, equating his love of country to his love of his husband was the deepest expression of passion possible. He’d been willing to lay down his life for the one. Chasten wondered for the first time if he’d be willing to lay down his life for the other.

“Maybe we’ll have a chance at a brokered convention,” Pete muttered. “1968 all over again. Now with Twitter.”

“Only one problem with that,” Chasten whispered.

Pete scoffed. “Only one?”

“You love your country too much to let it come to that.”

For a long while Pete said nothing. He closed his folder. The gesture had an air of finality to it. “I know,” he said, eventually.

It felt clear to Chasten that they’d arrived at the precipice of something: a question that both of them were terrified to answer and even more terrified to ask.

The moments ticked by.

The pressure became unbearable.

In the end, Pete was the one to say it. “Will you still love me when this is over?”

Chasten wondered, and felt wonder at all he remembered. Everything - from that first FaceTime conversation, to the cheap bottle of beer they’d shared the night of his mayoral re-election, to the pale sweaty nightmare that was November 2016, to the desperate Christmas Day goodbye kiss in their foyer, to the lazy humid summer nights spent on the front porch reading and laughing, to the proposal at O’Hare and the buoyant carelessness of the promise that their life together would always be an adventure - had somehow led them both to this South Carolina hotel room, alone and together in the lamp-lit darkness of three in the morning.

“Yes,” Chasten said.

Pete turned over, leaned on his elbow. “How can you possibly know that, though?” he pressed. “You haven’t had five minutes to self-examine this entire - ”

He didn’t need to hear any more. “Because the answer with you is always yes,” Chasten said. “Will _ always _be yes.”

“But if we don’t have..._ this _ anymore...” and Chasten’s heart ached to see how much it hurt Pete to condense a life’s work into a single italicized syllable. “Then who are we?” His expression turned worried. “Can we even know?”

Chasten searched his face. He knew that wasn’t the last question. He knew there was a deeper one, one that had haunted them both for as long as they could remember. He knew it would be the next thing Pete said. It was.

“If I don’t have _ this _,” Pete said, “who am I?”

The question was too big, with too many answers, too many implications._ Who am I? - and will I be worth it? _ All Chasten could think to say was the only truth he felt in the moment: “You’re my soulmate,” he said.

“Why?”

“Why? Because you are.” Chasten reached out a hand for his face, dazed anew that he’d been the one trusted to memorize its contours. “Loving you saved me.”

To his shock, Pete pulled Chasten’s hand away by the wrist, dug his fingernails a little into the skin. “You know that’s all a lie, right?” he said. “That’s a lie you tell to get a crowd to love me. It’s poison. Nobody saved you. If you’ve been saved, you saved yourself.”

“But you gave me a purpose,” Chasten protested. “Loving you, helping you, is the project of my life, and if giving someone a purpose isn’t saving someone, I don’t - ”

“That’s a fucking lie,” Pete said again with a surprising vehemence, “and it’s fucking dangerous. You don’t need a - a _ project _ to be worthwhile. You don’t have to _ do _anything. You’re important. You’re enough.”

Chasten stared at him, strangely hurt at the praise.

“Look,” Pete said. He loosened his grip on Chasten’s wrist. “No matter what happens - if we stay together, or if this turns into some fucked-up marriage of convenience, or if we just…” He swallowed. “If we just call it quits, because we ended up losing something that we needed once we lost this campaign…” He took a deep trembling breath, and dropped Chasten’s hand completely, as if he was letting him go. “You’ll be okay. You’ve always had everything you need to save yourself.”

A moment of silence passed. “Peter,” Chasten said. “Say that to a fucking mirror.”

He couldn’t quite follow the quick succession of expressions on Pete’s face - first a stunned realization, then a grimace, a discomfort, a doubt, and then, somehow, regret. Then he bit his lip and looked away, and Chasten could only guess what he felt by the tenor of his words.

“I’ve had a nightmare about this,” Pete said.

Chasten wanted to reach out for his hand again. He knew Pete wouldn’t take it. He held back. “About what?” he asked.

“It changes,” he said. “But the core is always the same. We win Iowa and New Hampshire, then lose Nevada and South Carolina. We roll out the red carpet for Biden, even as we’re both fucking terrified he’ll lose. Then he actually _ does _lose.” He turned back to Chasten, looked at him. His dark blue irises, set off by the flush of the fever, seemed cloudy, as if smeared with tears. “And because of that, I lose you. You always leave me. And for a fucking good reason.”

They said nothing. Chasten could only keep his eyes locked on Pete’s for a few seconds before the intensity became too much and he looked up at the ceiling instead.

“Do me a favor,” Chasten said after a long pause.

Pete’s voice was dull. “What?”

“Get me something from my suitcase.”

“What?” He sounded skeptical, but he dutifully obeyed orders anyway. “Cyanide tablets?”

He hesitated. “_ Becoming _,” he said.

The word made Pete stiffen visibly. A book by a First Lady was clearly the last thing he wanted to think about, but he dug it out anyway and handed it over and climbed back in. He reached to turn out the lamp on his side of the bed. “Forgive me if I’m not in the mood for another Michelle Obama recitation,” he said.

Chasten leaned over him, took his hand before it found the switch. His husband smelled helplessly sick, like faded Vicks and wine-colored cough syrup. “Well,” Chasten whispered, “forgive me if I’m in the mood to read a book.”

Pete gave in and laid down, turning away from the light and toward Chasten, closing his eyes. Chasten worked silently, ruffling pages past his thumb until he found the paper bookmark separating part two from the rest of the book.

“Peter,” he breathed, “do you remember this?” and Pete’s eyes fluttered back open. He took the note, struggling to sit halfway upright on his pillow to read it.

_ I love you _

_ I love you forever _

_ Please remember that _

_ Always _

_ Peter _

As he read, he looked like someone recalling a half-memory. “What…?”

Chasten brushed the back of his hand across Pete’s forehead. “You left this with the Joyce poem…” His voice became unsteady; he struggled to control it. “...one Sunday while you were at church.” He took a breath. “The morning you told me the adoption wouldn’t work out.”

Pete stared at his own writing, clearly confused at how a few simple lines had unintentionally, unknowingly spiraled into something with a much deeper meaning.

“And I was…” Chasten swallowed. “I was so devastated.”

It took Pete a moment to answer. “I know you were,” he said, voice breaking. Chasten suddenly was acutely aware that five minutes earlier, an election had been the only thing in their lives. But now, in this particular moment, in this tiny sliver of time and space, it seemed like the most inconsequential use of their love and energy possible. “I was, too.”

Again Chasten breathed gently: “Just as devastated as we are now.”

Pete looked from the paper up to him. Chasten understood his speechless gratitude: Pete thought this was mercy for his inhumanity. He was not inhuman, Chasten knew. But it would take longer than they had been together for Pete to agree, and it was too late at night to try to convince him. _ Later _, Chasten told himself, and he hurried on.

“Whenever I doubt us, whenever I wonder who we really are…” He shrugged helplessly. “I always look for something real. And this seemed like it was real.”

“I - ”

“I’m not saying I always know what’s real,” Chasten said quickly. “I don’t. And as long as we stay in politics I probably never will. But…” He struggled to verbalize. He struggled to be poetic. He struggled to be Peter. “I keep this note in this book, and I keep the book with me, to remind me of what we’re trying to do, and who I hope we are, and who I hope we could be, and what I hope we can do together, _ someday _, and I…”

Chasten trailed off into silence, not knowing how to finish. Pete was paralyzed, fingers gripping the note so tightly the skin on the tips was white.

“It was real,” Pete said. “It _ is _real.” And Chasten couldn’t tell if he was talking to Chasten or himself.

Chasten leaned on his shoulder, lightly brushed the hot flush of Pete’s fevered face with dry lips, murmuring five words into the curve of his skin: “Then hand me a pen.” He nodded toward the campaign paperwork on the bedside table. Pete obeyed without saying a word. Chasten noticed that as he passed the pen over, it was trembling.

Chasten closed the book to have a hard surface to write on, took the note from Pete, and signed his name beneath his. They took a quiet moment to admire the new signature: _ Always Peter & Chasten _. Even as they did, he was aware that the literary drama of the gesture would fade in time. If they stayed together, there would be more arguments, more quarrels, more power struggles. He and Pete were not people given to trite or simple endings, simply because they lived in a world that was real - built and shaped and destroyed and then built up again by real people - and he was exactly old enough to know that there are no truly happy endings in a world like that. But at least they had understood a moment, Chasten thought to himself. At least they had reached out and understood another soul beyond their own. That, it seemed to him, was a gift whose value could never be measured.

“I love you. I’ll love you always,” Chasten said. “Bow out now, Peter. Let’s give ourselves more time.”

* * *

March 1, 2020 - South Bend, Indiana

They briefly found their way home between announcing the dropout and leaving for the concession speech. Chasten hadn’t planned on speaking that evening - hadn’t woken up that morning planning on crafting an introduction to the end that would go down in American history - but Pete had suggested it: “Just imagine the optics, what it will mean to some kid out there watching,” and his mixing Chasten’s natural cynicism with his own natural idealism had melted Chasten’s heart and made him say yes.

He was in their bedroom alone. He heard Pete’s voice. He turned around to listen, to answer. But it was only the TV. Apparently he’d resorted to a campaign tic, turning to CNN without thinking as he’d entered the room. The chyron was about the suspension of the campaign. Chasten reached for the remote resting on the dresser top. He hesitated, took a deep breath, and turned the TV off, silencing Pete’s voice mid-thought.

In that silence, through the walls, he could hear the shapes of phrases, if not the words themselves, spoken by the real Pete, sitting now in his office at his desk beneath the Kennedy poster, and on a private call with the former Vice President of the United States.

Chasten opened the tie suitcase for the last time, taking out a handsome navy silk for Pete, then, after running his eyes down the meaning and messaging of every possible color combination, finally landing on a shade for himself that was so dark it might as well have been black.

He was just tying the knot when the voice in the other room fell silent, without fanfare. He heard slow footsteps in the hall outside. Chasten couldn’t tell if they were disappointed or just dazed. _ Open the door _, he beckoned to Pete silently, and Pete did.

Chasten tried his best to sound casual. “So?” he said, completely failing to sound casual. “Are you going to be useful?”

He looked up, tried to see the future written in Pete’s eyes. From the first time they’d met, he’d been able to read that future. He couldn’t now. All he saw now was an exhausted expression of gratitude and excitement and warmth. He was more at peace with the not knowing than he thought he’d be.

Pete walked up behind him, wrapped his arms around his waist, and looked at their reflections in the dresser mirror. “Well,” he said. “To steal a quote from you, I’m someone who knows what he wants, and I’m someone who knows how to get it.” And then, a whisper in his ear: “There’s going to be a next chapter,” and even as he said the words Chasten felt himself melting beneath his touch.

There wasn’t time to say or do all that Chasten wanted to say and do, yet. So he handed a tie over his shoulder instead. He looked away from the mirror and toward the real man standing at his side. “Always.”

* * *

Chasten Buttigieg finished his introduction of his husband with a quaver in his voice.

“For those of you who know me, you know I’m usually not short with words, but tonight I will be. It’s an honor to come home and to bring home the person I love so dearly. So please help me welcome to the stage my dear husband, the man I love so much, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”

Pete Buttigieg jogged up the stairs, strode across the stage, gave his husband a brief kiss and a long hug, and took his place to speak. After the crowd settled, he rapped the knuckles of his left hand three times against the podium. “It’s so good to be in South Bend,” he said. “Sometimes the longest way round really is the shortest way home. Here we are.”

* * *

_Always._ \- [Chasten Buttigieg, Twitter, March 1, 2020](https://twitter.com/Chas10Buttigieg/status/1234298860421382148)


End file.
